Performances that Change the Americas 9780367489496, 9781003043638, 9781032073620

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Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

PERFORMANCES THAT CHANGE THE AMERICAS Edited by Stuart A. Day

Performances that Change the Americas

This collection of essays explores activist performances, all connected to theater or performance training, that have changed the Americas—from the Southern Cone to Canada. Through the study of specific examples from numerous countries, the authors of this volume demonstrate a crucial, shared outlook: they affirm that ordinary people change the direction of history through performance. This project offers concrete, compelling cases that emulate the modus operandi of people like historian Howard Zinn. In the same spirit, the chapters treat marginal groups whose stories underscore the potentially unstoppable and transformative power of united, embodied voices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, art, and politics. Stuart A. Day is Professor of Spanish at the University of Kansas. A graduate of Northern Arizona University, The University of Arizona, and Cornell University, Day’s recent books include Outside Theater: Alliances That Shape Mexico and Modern Mexican Culture.

Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Considering theatre and performance alongside topics such as religion, politics, gender, race, ecology, and the avant-garde, titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Jerzy Grotowski and Ludwik Flaszen Five Encounters with the Sages Juliusz Tyszka American Cultures as Transnational Performance Commons, Skills, Traces Edited by Katrin Horn, Leopold Lippert, Ilka Saal, Pia Wiegmink Performances that Change the Americas Edited by Stuart A. Day Barrie Kosky on the Contemporary Australian Stage Affect, Post-Tragedy, Emergency Charlotte Farrell Surviving Theatre The Living Archive of Spectatorship Marco Pustianaz Opera in Performance Analyzing the Performative Dimension of Opera Productions Clemens Risi Poetic Images, Presence, and the Theater of Kenotic Rituals Eniko Sepsi For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Advances-in-Theatre--Performance-Studies/book-series/RATPS

Performances that Change the Americas

Edited by Stuart A. Day

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Stuart A. Day; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Stuart A. Day to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguingn-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Catalogingn-Publication Data Names: Day, Stuart A., editor. Title: Performances that change the Americas / edited by Stuart A. Day. Description: Abindon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge advances in theatre & performance studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This collection of essays explores activist performances, all connected to theater or performance training, that have changed the Americas-from Canada to the Southern Cone. Through the study of specific examples from numerous countries, the authors of this volume demonstrate a crucial, shared outlook: they affirm that ordinary people change the direction of history through performance. This project offers concrete, compelling cases that emulate the modus operandi of people like historian Howard Zinn. In the same spirit, the chapters treat marginal groups whose stories underscore the potentially unstoppable and transformative power of united, embodied voices. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, art and politics”‐‐ Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021009450 (print) | LCCN 2021009451 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367489496 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003043638 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Theater‐‐Political aspects‐‐America‐‐History. | Performance art‐‐America‐‐History. | Radical theater‐‐America‐‐History. | Theater and society‐‐America‐‐History. Classification: LCC PN2051 .P388 2021 (print) | LCC PN2051 (ebook) | DDC 792.097‐‐dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009450 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021009451 ISBN: 978-0-367-48949-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07362-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-04363-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638 Typeset in Times New Roman by MPS Limited, Dehradun

To the performers who change the Americas

Contents

List of figures List of contributors Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: case studies in activist performance

ix xi xvi 1

STUAR T A. DA Y

2 Playing Creole: circus dramas, the theater marketplace, and urban society in Argentina and Uruguay

20

W ILLIA M A C RE E

3 BASTA: reactivating bodies and the dramaturgy of femicides in Argentina

38

PA OLA HE RNÁ N D EZ

4 Carnival in hell: kinetic dissidence and the new queer carnivalesque in contemporary Brazil

59

PA BLO A SSUMP Ç Ã O B A R R O S C OS T A

5 Absent bodies and melted weapons: art and social change in contemporary Colombia

79

GA STÓ N A L ZAT E A N D P AO L A M AR ÍN

6 Queering Abiayala: personal and political cartographies of the Indigenous Americas

99

TIFF AN Y D. C RE E G AN M I LLE R

7 Music, poetry, and Créolité in the songs of Carole Demesmin, Singer, Troubadour, and Activist CÉC ILE A CCIL I E N

116

viii

Contents

8 An island in crisis: theater groups and social change in Puerto Rico in the new millennium

131

PR ISCILL A M EL É N D EZ

9 Performing the revolution: Castro’s Cuba

154

M AR TA M . CA MI N E R O - SA NT AN G EL O

10 The queer/muxe performance of disappearance: Lukas Avendaño’s butterfly utopia

175

A NTON IO P R I ETO STA MB A U G H

11 “Why are the Canadian authorities afraid of this play?”: Eight Men Speak and Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada

202

A LAN FI LEW O D

Index

221

Figures

2.1 With the goal of creating the society clear in mind, members of the Sociedad Criolla pose along the paseo criollo for a picture in May 1894 2.2 Cover of the eighth edition of Gerardo Grasso’s Pericón. Grasso’s rendition of the music for the dance performed around the region was just one of many composers’ attempts to vie for the claim (and accompanying profits) to have written the definitive score for the baile nacional 2.3 Looking the part, a member of the Sociedad Criolla poses for a photograph in his gaucho attire 2.4 Another member of the Sociedad Criolla poses for a photograph in his gaucho attire 2.5 Members of the Sociedad Criolla prepare for a pericón in 1919 3.1 Performance of BASTA outside ICBC, Florida Street and Diagonal Norte, Buenos Aires, December 2018 3.2 Performance of BASTA during the women’s march 8M, ICBC, Buenos Aires, March 8, 2019 3.3 Performance of BASTA, National Congress, Buenos Aires, March 6, 2020 3.4 Public call for BASTA, March 2020, Buenos Aires. Image courtesy of Expresión MoLE 3.5 Digital pamphlet during COVID times, June 2020. Image courtesy of Expresión MoLE 4.1 “Maricotinha.” 2018, Camila de Almeida 4.2 “Inferno Walk.” 2018, Camila de Almeida. People dance and parade through the streets at night 5.1 Voces de Resistencia documentary director talking to some of the Pogue Singers at one of their houses 5.2 The Pogue Singers performing in traditional Afro-Colombian attire in Bellavista (the site of the massacre)

21

29 33 34 35 45 46 47 48 53 63 69 80

82

x Figures 5.3 5.4 5.5 9.1 9.2 9.3

9.4

10.1 10.2

10.3

10.4

10.5

11.1

Two members of the Pogue singers in Afro-Colombian traditional attire, smiling at the camera. (ICESI) Entrance of the main corridor of the “Fragmentos” installation. Bogotá, 2017 Detail of the floor of the installation Fragmentos This image is one of the stock movie stills from Holiday in Mexico, similar to the one used in the Univision article A dove lands on Castro’s shoulder during his first speech in Havana, to thousands of Cubans “Fidel Castro Entertains in Harlem” during his visit to the United States for the United Nations General Assembly; Castro integrated his experience in Harlem into his speech to the UN as part of a general critique of US imperialism Cuban-Americans protest the removal of Elián González by force from his Miami relatives and repatriation to Cuba, waving both Cuban and US flags Lukas Avendaño in Réquiem para un alcaraván, Xalapa, Veracruz, México, 2012 Buscando a Bruno performed outside the Mexican Counsultate of Barcelona, Spain in June of 2018. Lukas Avendaño holds hands with a local artist from the Xica Teatre group Lukas Avendaño at the entrance to the Fiscalía General de la República (National Prosecutor’s Office) building in Mexico City, during the “Llamado a la autoridad” demonstration, May 2019 Performance of ¿Dónde está Bruno? during the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ XI Encuentro at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), June 2019 Concluding moments of ¿Dónde está Bruno? during the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ XI Encuentro at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), June 2019 The final tableau of Eight Men Speak, staged in 1933, shows the members of the Worker’s Court angrily pointing at the cowering figure of Capitalism as they announce him guilty of the attempted murder of Canadian Communist leader Tim Buck

85 91 94 156 160

162

172 177

179

187

189

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Contributors

William Acree (PhD UNC Chapel Hill) is Professor of Spanish in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. His research and teaching center on the cultural history of the Río de la Plata, with particular attention to popular culture and everyday life. His recent book, Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay (University of New Mexico Press), traces the growth and impact of popular entertainment, most notably the Creole Circus phenomenon in the late 1800s, and its enduring imprint on cultural marketplaces. His first book, Everyday Reading: Print Culture & Collective Identity in the Río de la Plata, 1780-1910 (2011; Argentine edition 2013), was awarded the Latin American Studies Association Southern Cone Section 2013 Humanities Book Award. He is the editor of The Gaucho Juan Moreira (2014), and coeditor of Building Nineteenth-Century Latin America (2009), Jacinto Ventura de Molina: los caminos de la escritura negra en el Río de la Plata (2010), and Empire’s End: Transnational Connections in the Hispanic World (2016). Acree taught at San Diego State University prior to joining Washington University. Cé cile Accilien is professor and chair in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia. Her area of studies are Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures and Film & Media Studies. She is the author of Rethinking Marriage in Francophone African and Caribbean Literatures (Lexington Books, 2008). She has also coedited and contributed to two collections of essays, Revolutionary Freedoms: A History of Survival, Strength and Imagination in Haiti (Caribbean Studies Press, 2006) and Just Below South: Intercultural Performance in the Caribbean and the U.S. South (University of Virginia Press, 2007); She has published articles in the Journal of Haitian Studies, Women, Gender and Families of Color, Southern Quarterly and Diaspora in Caribbean Art. She has an upcoming co-edited volume (with Valérie Orlando) Teaching Haiti: Strategies for Creating New Narratives (University Press of Florida, 2021). She currently serves as chair of the Editorial Board of Women, Gender and Families of Color and is on the advisory board of the Haitian Studies Association.

xii Contributors Gastón A. Alzate is Professor of Spanish (Latin American Theater and Literatures) at California State-Los Angeles. He has published on Latin American theater, popular culture, literature, film, and visual arts in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Spain, the UK, and France. Along with Paola Marín he is director of the journal KARPA, which is dedicated to theater and visual culture criticism. KARPA encompasses miscellaneous aspects of Latin American and Iberian cultures such as political cabaret, dance, performance art, theater, graffiti, photography, and film. In his native country he won the National Essay Prize (Colombian Ministry of Culture). He was also the first Latin American Theatre Review Cátedra Woodyard recipient (University of Kansas) and was an invited Resident Researcher for a year at the International Center for Interweaving Performance Cultures (Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany). Pablo Assumpção Barros Costa is Associate Professor of Dance and Performance and Chair of the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Arts at Universidade Federal do Ceará, in Fortaleza, Brazil. His writing has appeared in various journals, collections, and catalogues published in Brazil, focusing primarily on the politics and aesthetics of embodiment in performance art and everyday life, as well as the cultural politics of queerness and belonging in Northeast Brazil. In 2017, he was a Global Visiting Scholar at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. Marta Caminero-Santangelo is Professor in the English Department and Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She was born to Cuban immigrant parents in Canada, grew up in a suburb of Pittsburgh, earned her BA in English from Yale University, and received a PhD in English from UC Irvine. Caminero-Santangelo taught in Chicago before coming to The University of Kansas as an Assistant Professor in 1997. Her academic research involves the question of how literature interacts with the “real world.” She has published three books: The Madwoman Can’t Speak: Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive (Cornell UP, 1998); On Latinidad: US Latino Literature and the Construction of Ethnicity (UP Florida, 2007); and Documenting the Undocumented: Latina/o Narrative and Social Justice in the Era of Operation Gatekeeper (UP Florida, 2016). Tiffany D. Creegan Miller is Assistant Professor of Spanish at Colby College, and she works on contemporary Central American cultural studies, focusing on Maya literatures, oral traditions, and performance art. Her research interests include Latin American Indigenous social movements, decolonial theory, gender inequalities, and digital humanities. Her published work addressing Maya poetries and Indigenous LatinX diasporic identities in the United States has appeared in journals such as Hispanic Studies Review and Label Me Latino/a, as well as edited volumes. Miller’s first book, The Maya Art of Speaking Writing: Remediating Indigenous Orality in the Digital Age (University of Arizona Press, 2022),

Contributors xiii draws from fieldwork in the Guatemalan Highlands (2010–2019). She has an advanced linguistic proficiency in Kaqchikel Maya and currently serves as an advisor and volunteer translator/interpreter to a Guatemala-based medical NGO, Wuqu’ Kawoq: Maya Health Alliance. Stuart A. Day is Professor of Spanish (BS in Spanish and Education, Northern Arizona University’s Center for Excellence in Education; MA in Hispanic Literature, University of Arizona; PhD in Latin American Literature, Cornell University). His first book, Staging Politics in Mexico: The Road to Neoliberalism, was published by Bucknell University Press. Day has also published several play anthologies. He co-edited El Teatro de Rascón Banda: voces en el umbral (Escenelogía) with Jacqueline E. Bixler; and Mexican Public Intellectuals (Palgrave 2014) with Debra A. Castillo. Recent books include Outside Theater: Alliances That Shape Mexico (University of Arizona Press, 2017) and Modern Mexican Culture (University of Arizona Press, 2017). Current projects are a book on documents (passports, voter identification cards, etc.) and the completion of three plays. Day is Managing Editor of the Latin American Theatre Review. Until his retirement in 2018, Alan Filewod was Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, where he specialized in Canadian drama and political theatre. His books include Collective Encounters: Documentary Theatre in English Canada (1987), Workers Playtime: Theatre and the Labour Movement Since 1970 (with David Watt, 2001), Performing Canada: The Nation Enacted in the Imagined Theatre (2002), Theatre Histories: Critical Perspectives on Canadian Theatre in English (2008), Committing Theatre: Theatre Radicalism and Political Intervention in Canada (2011) and a critical edition of the banned communist play Eight Men Speak (2013). He is a former editor of Canadian Theatre Review and has served as president of the Canadian Association for Theatre Studies, and the Association for Canadian and Quebecois Literatures. Paola S. Hernández is Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre and performance as well as Latinx Studies. She has published numerous articles on Southern Cone theater, performance and memory politics, sites of memory, human rights, and documentary theater. She is the author of Staging Lives in Latin America: Bodies-Objects-Archives (Northwestern UP, 2021), where she examines the role of the “real” in theatre and visual arts with an emphasis on contemporary documentary theatre in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. She has also authored El teatro de Argentina y Chile: Globalización, resistencia y desencanto (Corregidor, 2009), and is co-editor as well as of Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives (with Brenda Werth and Florian Becker, Palgrave, 2013) as well as (with Pamela Brownell) of Biodrama/Proyecto Archivos: seis documentales

xiv Contributors escénicos by Vivi Tellas (Papeles Teatrales, Universidad de Córdoba, 2017). Hernández is currently Director of the Center for Visual Cultures. Paola Marín is Professor of Arts and Letters at California State University, Los Angeles. She has published on Latin American and Spanish literature, theater, and visual arts in academic journals in the United States, Mexico, Colombia, and the United Kingdom. She is co-editor of the Editorial Karpa (Cal State LA). Her book on the theater of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz entitled Teología and conciencia criolla was published by the University and Minnesota and Ediciones Clásicas in 2006. She translated into Spanish Terror and Performance by Indian cultural critic and director Rustom Bharucha, which was published with an introduction by Leo CabranesGrant (KARPA, 2017). Along with Gastón Alzate she co-edited the two volumes entitled Cartografías críticas. These are the proceedings of the research seminar on art and politics coordinated by Professor Ileana Diéguez Caballero at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (KARPA, 2018). Priscilla Meléndez is Professor of Hispanic Studies at Trinity College in Hartford. She is a specialist in Spanish American theater and narrative of the 20th and 21st centuries and her research has centered mainly on Mexican, Argentine, and Caribbean theater. Meléndez has written on the works of the Mexicans Emilio Carballido, Vicente Leñero, Sabina Berman, and Hugo Salcedo, of the Argentines Osvaldo Dragún, Griselda Gambaro, Eduardo Rovner, and Diana Raznovich, and of Caribbean playwrights Luis Rafael Sánchez, José Triana, Alberto Pedro Torrente, and Gerardo Fulleda León. She is the author of three books: La dramaturgia hispanoamericana contemporánea: Teatralidad y autoconciencia (1990), The Politics of Farce in Contemporary Spanish American Theater (2006) and Asaltos al escenario: Humor, género e historia en el teatro de Sabina Berman (2021). Her essays have appeared in Hispanic Review, Symposium, Latin American Theatre Review, Gestos, Modern Language Notes, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos (Washington University), Latin American Literary Review, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, and Modern Drama, among others. She earned her BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras and received her PhD in Contemporary Latin American Literature from Cornell University. Antonio Prieto Stambaugh specializes in contemporary Latin American theatre and performance art, focusing particularly on artists that deal with issues of gender, class and ethnicity. He is Professor of theater and performance studies in the Theater Department of the Veracruzana University (Facultad de Teatro, Universidad Veracruzana, in Mexico), where he currently chairs the graduate program in Performing Arts (Maestría en Artes Escénicas). He holds an MA in Performance Studies from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a PhD in Latin American Studies from the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of Mexico’s National University (UNAM).

Contributors xv Antonio Prieto Stambaugh is co-author with Yolanda Muñoz González of the book El teatro como vehículo de comunicación (Editorial Trillas, 1992); editor of four books, the most recent of which is Corporalidades escénicas: Representaciones del cuerpo en el teatro, la danza y el performance (Universidad Veracruzana–Argus-a, 2016); and editor of the peerreviewed journal Investigación Teatral. Revista de artes escénicas y performatividad. He is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (SNI).

Acknowledgements

I am truly grateful to the contributors in this volume, the University of Kansas, Diana Rico (copyeditor extraordinaire), and the incredible support from the outstanding editorial team at Routledge.

1

Introduction: case studies in activist performance Stuart A. Day The University of Kansas

If anyone questioned the efficacy of grassroots organizing in the twenty-first century, the US Tea Party’s success, eventually leading to the single-term election of Donald Trump in fall 2016, provided a clear answer: door knocking, social media engagement, plus locally and nationally organized rallies worked. The election stunned activists across the political spectrum—and across the world. Average people (with significant help from the US Electoral College, Vladimir Putin, conservative billionaires, the National Rifle Association (NRA), white evangelical churches, et cetera) had found a performer, a billionaire evil genius at the podium, someone to help them push back against the relatively progressive Barack Obama era in order to preserve white supremacy. Many of us looked on in despair as the 2016 election results came in, jealous of conservative success, ready to flood progressive organizations with cash, and determined to take back the power of performance, following a long tradition of progressive predecessors. This book is about activist performances that change the Americas, from the Southern Cone to Canada. Small or large, activist performances are carefully staged and often self-referential. They add art to activism and vice versa. They are protests with dramatic structure (sometimes subtle, sometimes not), they have “scripts” (again, sometimes subtle, sometimes not; they are rarely logocentric), and they often require the participation of the powers that be, generally because they force authorities to make a choice: attack, retreat, or, occasionally, acquiesce. In this sense, they compel those in power to play a role. In their own roles, activist performers demand justice in myriad ways; at times they are humorous in their endeavours, at times deadly serious—at times both. Our main objective in the pages that follow is to demonstrate that the link between theater/performance and politics is anything but ephemeral. It need not be an afterthought or a “could be” but is, rather, an effective means to transform society. Through the study of specific examples from numerous countries, we demonstrate a crucial, shared outlook: we affirm that ordinary people change the direction of history through performance. Our book is not a catalogue of successful protests, which would of course be impossible to compile. Nor does it attempt to cover all modes of activism. What we do DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-1

2 Stuart A. Day offer are concrete, compelling cases in an attempt to emulate the modus operandi of people like historian Howard Zinn, a writer who expressed himself in many genres, including theater. Zinn wrote the seminal underdog tome A People’s History of the United States, which, as the title suggests, narrates history in a way that makes visible those who would otherwise remain in the shadows. In the same spirit, our chapters treat marginal groups (albeit of dramatically varying privilege and power) whose stories underscore the potentially unstoppable and transformative power of united, embodied voices. In Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell remind readers that “fools, clowns and carnivals have always played a subversive role, while art, culture and creative protest tactics have for centuries served as fuel and foundation for successful social movements” (1). Boyd and Mitchell, seasoned activists, also write that they perceive the increased importance and influence of artistic activism: “This new wave of creative activism first drew mainstream attention in 1999 at the Battle in Seattle, but it didn’t start there. In the 1980s and ’90s, groups like ACT-UP, Women’s Action Coalition and the Lesbian Avengers inspired a new style of high-concept shock politics that both empowered participants and shook up public complacency. In 1994, the Zapatistas, often described as the first post-modern revolutionary movement, awakened the political imagination of activists round the world, replacing the dry manifesto and the sectarian vanguard with fable, poetry [and] theater” (2). Heightened activist activity and awareness of the importance of performance inspire us to look to new (to some of us) forms of protest and to earlier periods, particularly the 1960s and ’70s, to uncover and document the components of their success. Our examples often provide counterweights (identified variously in the chapters that follow as counternarratives, counterstate, part of the countermachine—as opposed to the narco-machine—counterjudicial incursions, et cetera) to the equally performative practices of powerful conservative entities in business and government, which can be easily discerned at every point in history. In his Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” for instance, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about deceptively simple, cruel performances that, taken together, had an enormous impact on the not-sodistant past and that continue to stymie the possibility of equality throughout the United States. In a section of the article on racist housing practices in and around Chicago, Coates underscores the performative side of redlining, the discriminatory denial of loans and other services, as well as other racist housing practices: Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number

Introduction

3

in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now. The next step in this racist practice was always to sell to Black families, who were forced to pay exorbitant prices under unreasonable, and in many cases unsustainable, terms. Richard Rothstein, in The Color of Law, writes that blockbusting and many other unethical practices might have been business run but that the US government legislated segregation—and is therefore constitutionally responsible for its effects. He tells of the time future Pulitzer Prize–winning professor Wallace Stegner was recruited to Stanford University. Even then, housing prices were steep in Palo Alto, California. Stegner joined a housing cooperative that planned to build hundreds of houses on a large plot of land next to the university; however, “banks would not finance construction costs nor issue mortgages to the co-op or to its members without government approval, and the FHA would not insure loans to a cooperative that included African American members” (11). In other words, and as seen above and in the following chapters, some change—good or bad—happens only through the power of law, which is why judicial reform is central to most activists’ playbooks. But perception is also critical, and sometime the performance is the change. Without being overly prescriptive, in the following pages of this introduction I offer numerous brief case studies that begin to delineate the types of performances highlighted throughout this book. In the examples above, Coates and Rothstein write about the midcentury US Midwest and the Bay Area, respectively. Not long after, in the early to mid-sixties, a set of performances, what Neil R. McMillen calls “high moral drama played out in … public spaces,” were taking place in the South. Unlike the performances of predatory housing described earlier, these acts were staged as part of a large movement to challenge the small- and largescale injustice of segregation. McMillen’s use of theater metaphors to describe activist engagement goes beyond a reference to everyday performance (the familiar notion that “all the world’s a stage”). He describes civil rights strategies and the way “black activists and their few white allies broke the back of Jim Crow by compelling a reluctant federal government to enforce the Constitution.” McMillen documents multiple staged demonstrations, in what he terms “the movement’s street theater period,” that changed the way the world saw civil rights protest. In Mississippi these included the Freedom Elections of 1963: “Aaron Henry, a Clarksdale pharmacist and state NAACP leader, and his slate of ‘Freedom Candidates,’ didn’t really have a prayer. In a state where nearly all blacks were disfranchised, they were ‘elected’ in an unofficial straw ballot by some 80,000 citizens who could not

4 Stuart A. Day legally vote. They were victorious, however, in the theater of national opinion.” McMillen also outlines one of the better-known examples of scripted activist performance, part of the movement in Birmingham, Alabama: “Project C—Project Confrontation—scripted by Southern Christian Leadership Conference strategists for King’s 1963 Birmingham Campaign was not an exercise in idealism. Project C, as its name implied, was calculated to provoke an excessive show of white force in Birmingham that would unsettle the national conscience and force federal intervention …. The plan required a high degree of unwitting cooperation by Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor and his heavy-handed cops. Connor did cooperate, playing the role of a hardhearted ‘heavy’ as though he had read the script.” The images that resulted from the Birmingham campaign are widely considered to be critical in creating the perception, especially in the North, that it was no longer possible to turn a blind eye when it came to civil rights. The children who participated in the marches and other expressions of mostly peaceful resistance were not actors per se, but they were trained and assigned roles in the series of protests that made up the Birmingham campaign. The resulting photos of people being attacked by water cannons and canines were too much—either politically or ethically—for national leaders, including President John F. Kennedy. The theatrics of the movement were critical to the success of mid-sixties social change, as was the idea that well-designed actions will force political foes to play a required role, a type of coerced improvisation that limits the responses available and plays to a person’s tendencies. (Improvisation is an art form that is, ironically, known for a high level of structure.) McMillen is clear about the impact of performance: “The Birmingham Campaign alone did not produce the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But no one should doubt that the weight of King’s demonstrations, combined with the 1961 Freedom Rides, the 1962 University of Mississippi integration crisis, and the broader southern struggle for suffrage and desegregation pushed the politically cautious Kennedy administration to introduce the sweeping legislation that President Lyndon Johnson later signed into law in 1964.” This is the type of link we underscore in the chapters that follow to add to global writing on the power of activism and, to a certain extent, to realign our reading of history as influenced by explicit performances that encompass the performative machinations not only of conservative elites but also of performers who resist the status quo. A different but equally complex context—the 1976 to 1983 dictatorship, or proceso, that left up to 30,000 murdered and disappeared at the hands of the Argentine government—offers another example that civic engagement can induce change. Diana Taylor, writing about the activist performances of the groups HIJOS and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, contends that “the short- and long-term effects of these performances are difficult to measure. Over four hundred torturers have been brought to trial and are now serving

Introduction

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life sentences. Did the activism by Mothers and HIJOS make that happen? It’s hard to prove, although we would probably be correct in saying that justice would not have been done had the groups not persisted.” Taylor explains further: “As the Mothers and HIJOS have made evident, the search for justice is a long, durational performance. Although the tactics and circumstances change over time, it’s the endurance and perseverance that prove efficacious” (153). As the acronym in Spanish implies, HIJOS represents children of the victims of the war, many of whom were forcibly taken and given to the families of the military; while the Mothers (and Grandmothers) of the Plaza de Mayo have gained worldwide attention for the constant presence they and others have held in Buenos Aires in front of the Argentine presidential palace. The incremental pressure both sets of activists fomented has led—and continues to lead—to real change in Argentina. Taylor is spot-on in her assertion that “the search for justice is a long, durational performance,” though she would also certainly agree that some performances result in more immediate—or immediately promising— change. The striking impact of activist performances, as was the case in Birmingham, can lead to swift action (granted, swift action followed by painfully slow, uneven change), often from politicians who either find an excuse to act or act because they can no longer find an excuse to remain silent. No matter the way people go about activist performances, both slow and dramatic change often occurs because people put their bodies on the line at a given time in history. Woven throughout the chapters that follow are performances that changed society in the moment—their very existence ushered in a different reality. A recent example from my own experience is a meditation, livestreamed from the University of Kansas, by professor and playwright Darren Canady after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The performance and its framing were remarkable: it began with a bold statement by the university’s chancellor, followed by eight minutes and forty-six seconds of silence—the length of time a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck—accompanied by nighttime views of the campus’s campanile, a World War II memorial and one of the university’s most iconic landmarks. What followed were Canady’s words, performed by the artist himself: This will be a year of burning The streets are sweating We are a nation measured in masks and infections and march numbers and solidarity posts and caught up in a crucible of rage and pain and bewilderment Pressure packing us in to a confrontation A reckoning A collision with flesh and blood and spirit Spirits named George and Breonna and Tony and Ahmaud joining this great hovering host of blackness

6 Stuart A. Day Beautiful, aggrieved, still vivid blackness A mighty throng of witnesses who have felt the terror and the breaking and the bringing to heel of American Black bodies Black bodies across genders and ages and sexualities and places and times They throng up there with Emmett and Mary and Sandra and Amadou and tonight we fall before them and we shout them out and feel them pulling their names out of our throats, pushing some to tears Wrapping others in a precise, focused, steadfast anger that plants itself in front of batons and shields and closed gates and indifference. But here you are black and brown in the heartland You here on this hill This second Oread This rising place above a golden valley Your minds sharp with intellect and pierced with talent You have come here to the Jayhawks’ Nest and followed trails made possible by the same strength that holds that throng of spirits aloft And you have waited to be heard to be seen to be called in to community to be made at home and be celebrated you are not crazy when you say you have been shunned you are not lying when you say this school must do more you are not imagining the attacks and your exhaustion Let that same crucible scorching the nation also bring its heat here and let us scoop something new out of its ashes a place that knows this land we learn on—this land that has seen genocide and war and wagon wheels and free soil that this school set upon it will not turn away from the 2020 burning the sweating the throng of black spirits—that somehow we will fashion a place worthy of you and every bit of liberated humanity that you possess (“Meditation 2020”) Canady’s performance does many things: it references the racial pandemic as well as the COVID pandemic; calls out to the past, specifically the history of Kansas and the land upon which the University of Kansas was built; links present-day murders to past murders; and challenges the people who make up the University of Kansas—located on its own Mount Oread, with the Jayhawk as its mascot—to do better. Remarkable performances like this sometimes lead to change and sometimes not. But it is critical to recognize that sometimes the performance is the change. While Kansas was established as a free state and the University of Kansas has its own history of political activism (e.g., Canady’s mother, Linda Canady, was a civil rights activist at KU in the 1970s), this was a counterperformance that gained power through context. Despite the fact that in 2020 almost 70 percent of Douglas County, where the city of Lawrence and the University of Kansas are located, voted for President Joseph Biden, Kansas is a red state. Words like those Canady

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spoke represent a contextual rupture, an authorized aberration that did what performances do best: it left a before-and-after mark on the university that—as surprising and absurd as this might seem—authorized an immediate cultural change. It was now acceptable to proclaim, from classrooms to deans’ offices, that Black Lives Matter. Canady’s performance also complicates the link between performance training and political activism. That is, one of the central ideas in this book is to link theater and performance training to political activism. But what “training” led to the power of this performance? A degree from Juilliard? Yes. Religion? Yes. Family tradition? Yes. The experiences of a Black, gay man in the United States? Yes. Working as a creative writing professor? Yes. Canady told me that as much as through his life experiences and artistic training, his words were formed through conversations: “I knew students were in pain and were telling me that their pain was so often unacknowledged.” Performative pedagogy—that is, activist performance—is always already beyond the bounds of an academic discipline, even performance studies. And teaching—arguably the main goal of activist performance—offers an effective/affective way to fight ignorance. In Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies, Henry A. Giroux writes: “That racism exists among literate people suggests that more is at work than their ignorance of its untenable and contradictory logic …. Not only do students need to understand the economic and political interests that shape and legitimate racist discourses, they must also address the strong emotional investments they may bring to such beliefs” (104). Giroux quotes Shoshana Felman, who invokes Jacques Lacan’s notion that ignorance is a passion: “Ignorance is nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than performative.” At its best, performance lowers resistance to knowledge. And maybe people were transfixed, transformed, and moved to act by Canady’s incantations—I certainly was. Yet Canady’s performance, as I mentioned above, was the change. The link between staged productions in performance venues versus public, political performance is central to the work of Mexican artist Jesusa Rodríguez, who ran a political cabaret in Mexico City for many years. When Mexico’s current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, lost his first presidential bid in 2006, Rodríguez offered a critical example of the connection between the theater space and the public, political sphere: “I placed everything I could at the disposal of the resistance movement protesting electoral fraud after Felipe Calderón was named president, especially for the large demonstrations in the zócalo that reached two million people,” she told me in an interview. “What I proposed to them was that I could oversee the scenic direction of the pavilion because, in general, the pavilion is seen as a political concern, but in the end it follows the same laws as any stage.” She certainly had an impact in her cabaret, as I have argued more extensively elsewhere, but as part of the resistance she used the tools of the trade on another, bigger, stage. Rodríguez continues: “I would say that it’s an

8 Stuart A. Day amazing change to go beyond the cabaret—political farce created in an enclosed stage. We can really say that our work passes from one plane to another, where theater has direct political consequences, something that, as much as one tries, is not going to happen in the enclosed space of the cabaret. It’s like talking about the map and talking about the land; we have now moved to the land.” Breaking down the invisible fourth wall that separates spectators from the stage was always one of Rodríguez’s specialties, but walking out the door and into the streets added a new dimension to her work. Rodríguez—now the first openly gay senator in Mexico and more powerful than ever—promises to continue to apply her expertise in performance art to the national stage. Indeed, in an interview shortly after her 2018 election victory, she affirmed that the Senate, like the political cabaret and the campaign rally, is a theater, a stage (“Jesusa Rodríguez se viste de senadora”). Despite the move from small to large stage that Rodríguez and others have accomplished, and despite (or perhaps because of) the actor or performance training that many activists experience, calling an activist an actor is one of the most powerful accusations in the destructive political arsenal; to be called an activist-actor or crisis actor is, of course, meant as the ultimate insult. To label an activist a paid actor is to tag them as an outside agitator, someone not authentically committed to a cause or legitimately part of a specific community. It is a tried and true way to delegitimize protestors and to fire up a base that always already feels threatened. A highprofile reminder of the activists-are-paid-actors strategy presented itself in the US in 2018. The performances resulted from yet another school massacre, this time in Parkland, Florida. The combination of well-funded, already-extant nongovernmental organizations, high-profile donors, and— most importantly—activist students like Emma González galvanized people on the left, while on the right her ultrashort haircut and latinidad were a threat—and therefore a boon—for NRA fundraising. And, of course, conservatives went on the attack, calling the students “actors.” This was nothing new, as many people will recall. Michael E. Miller reminds us, for example, that “sixty-one years before teens at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., would survive a mass shooting only to be labelled ‘crisis actors,’ the nine African American teens who braved racist crowds to enroll in Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas were also accused of being impostors.” Part of the resulting defense from the NAACP was that the students were not actors but “children of local residents, including veterans” (Miller). The need to provide evidence to contradict the claim that protestors are not legitimate but, rather, paid actors is often necessary, but doing so (1) sets up a detrimental need to take a conservative, more-patriotic-than-thou stance and (2) leads to the denial of fruitful links. Regarding this second point, Michael Shulman points out that “one of the less inspiring things about the movement led by student survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting has been the

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conspiracy theory … that the students are actually ‘crisis actors.’ It’s a warped brand of trutherism that spread after Sandy Hook and has since been impossible to reason with. But that isn’t to say that the kids aren’t actors” (my emphasis). Indeed, an oft-quoted line from one of the #enough student leaders makes an elegant connection between acting and activism. As Schulman reminds us, “Cameron Kasky, the seventeen-year-old firebrand who started the Never Again movement with his classmates, told Wolf Blitzer, ‘Well, if you had seen me in our school’s production of ‘Fiddler on the Roof,’ you would know that nobody would pay me to act for anything.’” The pleasure of seeing “theater kids” on the political stage highlights both an underdog mentality (the drama kids are out front) and the fact that being “dramatic” is a good political skill. “‘All these kids are drama kids, and I’m a dramatic kid, so it really meshes well,’ Emma González, one of Kasky’s compatriots, told [New Yorker writer] Emily Witt. (Kasky had just left drama class when the shooting began.)” The link is sometimes tenuous and sometimes not; however, tracing the connections between the theater stage and the stage of politics leads not only to a defense of the arts but to potential activist strategies. In a very basic sense, theater students learn to value the back and forth of dialogue, to listen for verbal and nonverbal cues, to speak in front of an audience, and to understand the power of silence. Connections to theater can be once removed—not to mention that in many schools drama classes are not even available. Still, the work of actors who become activists, both amateur and professional, can and does lead to real change, as was the case with the sharp uptick in youth voter registration and gun-control legislation (and the blocking of NRA-backed legislation) after the Parkland massacre, much of which has been directly attributed to the students of #enough. In addition to attacks from conservative quarters on progressive activist performances, parody (and sometimes parodic backlash) is a key element of the context in which activist performances succeed or fail. Parodic backlash is often characterized by performances that become parodies of themselves, leaving little room for parodists to do their work (think of the dilemma that writers at parody magazines face when leaders throughout the Americas produce news that is already laughable). Parody is powerful when the context is right—it cuts to the core. Yet in some cases, performances become parodies of themselves, leaving the work of cultural critics like cartoonists to simply document happenings, at times wondering what their role in society has become. Such was the case for the aforementioned Mexican leader, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, after the presidential election in 2006. While many, if not most, people agree that he lost to fraud, leaving Felipe Calderón as the country’s leader, his move to declare himself Mexico’s legitimate president left him open to ridicule. Performance allows people to rehearse future realities in a way that other forms of art/activism do not, yet it was easy to make a mockery of López Obrador’s faux swearing-in

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ceremony and his fictional counterpresidency. There’s a fine line between activist performances that invigorate a community (a key element for success) and those that not only suffer the attempted parodies of the right or left but become self-parodies, as was the case with López Obrador’s resistance movement. A primary component that allows for a parody to become more than social commentary is perceived potential outcome. In the case of López Obrador’s “presidencia legítima,” doubt among voters that Mexico’s political machine could be beaten doomed the performance in a way similar to a linguistic misfire. Linda Hutcheon reminds us, in books like Irony’s Edge and A Theory of Parody, that irony and parody are in the eye of the beholder, so of course the role of spectators is critical; each of us judges success or failure through our own frames. And to be sure, one performance, or a series of performances or demonstrations, can fail initially but unify a group as they prepare for future activism—and success. As history has shown, a contextual shift (a monumentally unpopular political opponent, the fruits of grassroots politics, casualties from the “war on drugs”) and even, some might argue, seeing López Obrador theatrically “sworn in” made all the difference in the subsequent 2018 election of this leftist president, since there’s nothing like theater and performance to allow us to envision embodied possible futures. A power dynamic strong enough to avoid misfires comes from a variety of sources, including the performer, the audience, allied groups, the media, and so forth. Much of the power of performances derives from partnerships, both formal and informal. The Teatro Campesino, working alongside César Chávez in the US during the 1965–1970 Delano, California grape strike and boycott, is an excellent example of side-by-side, complementary performances that led to concrete change in farmworker rights as well as the field of teatro chicano. As Richard Griswold del Castillo describes it, the playwright Luis Valdez “had grown up in a migrant family but had escaped from the fields to the city and become a university student and member of the radical theatre group, the San Francisco Mime Troupe” (87). Valdez’s actos—short skits developed in large part by campesinos, who would stage them for their fellow workers—were created on site and benefited from Valdez’s ability to combine his own experiences with the best of theater greats, like Bertolt Brecht and Cantinflas. The combination of these two men’s work, plus Aztec mythology, forms the basis of Valdez’s theories of performance. He and the campesinos also took advantage of the inherent drama in politics and the news media. As Valdez affirms, “The reality of campesinos on strike had become dramatic (and theatrical as reflected by newspapers, TV newscasts, films, etc.) and so the actos merely reflected the reality” (Early Works, 11). A farmworker on a makeshift stage, playing to fellow workers along a picket line, speaks words that imagine a different future, mock the patrón in ways that would never be acceptable in real life, and attach the plight of workers to national politics. That is the power of

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performance based on the theory of the theater. The documented success of the US farmworkers’ movement and its critical link to theater provide a model for grassroots performance activism. This partnership—César Chávez’s activism and Luis Valdez’s actos—also represents a microcosm of allyship at a national level during the civil rights movement, as seen in this telegraph from Martin Luther King Jr. to Chávez: “Our separate struggles are really one—a struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity …. We are together with you in spirit and in determination that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized” (Griswold del Castillo, 81). The Filipino workers who started the Delano grape strike, Chávez, who agreed to fight with them, the people who performed during the Delano grape strike, and those who continue the struggle are directly responsible, along with many others, for the success of the United Farm Workers union. The UFW, which like all unions in the United States continually strives to survive and has faced its share of challenges, including challenges with Chávez’s leadership in the years before his death, simply would not exist were it not for the confluence of allies that made for a successful movement. We see this allyship in “BASTA: Reactivating Bodies and the Dramaturgy of Femicides in Argentina,” chapter 2 of this book, in which Paola Hernández writes about a small Argentine performance troupe called Expresión MoLE. This group uses their formal training as acrobats and dancers to embody femicide, the murder of girls and women. Similar to the way Valdez worked alongside Chávez, joining a movement but adding an explicit theatrical angle to the always already performative nature of strikes, marches, and other forms of protest, Expresión MoLE works alongside the group Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less), or NUM, an all-female activist group in the lineage of the aforementioned Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo). The mothers and grandmothers began marching two by two in 1977 to protest disappearances of their loved ones during the Argentine dictatorship. Expresión MoLE’s alliance with NUM is one born of specific events; their first performance was part of a coalition, led by NUM, to protest the acquittal of two men in the rape and murder of sixteen-year-old Lucía Pérez. As part of the 2018 national women’s march and strike, Expresión MoLE worked alongside NUM and others to make visible in public spaces the atrocities of femicide. As seen in their performances’ disturbing, powerful images of real women in clear trash bags, Hernández highlights the ways audiences, many of whom are not typically exposed to performance art, experience the hypervisibilty of mistreated bodies. They do so in broad daylight through Expresión MoLE’s performance BASTA (STOP). Hernández explains that BASTA started out with a small group of women performers but quickly grew. In the initial group, performers were all trained acrobats—a strong link between performance training and movements that promote social change. In the case of BASTA, the change is twofold: it is part of a broader activist, performative movement in Argentina that has led

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to specific legal actions, not least of which is the revocation of amnesty for the military’s murder of 30,000 people during the dictatorship; and it explicitly makes femicide visible, often to new audiences—they become tangible through art. In “Playing Creole: Circus Dramas, the Theater Marketplace, and Urban Society in Argentina and Uruguay,” chapter 3, William Acree writes about spring 1894 when the dean of the school of medicine in Montevideo, Uruguay joined friends for a fiesta criolla. They were wearing gaucho “costumes” and people began following them as they walked through the city streets—they, too, like the performance artists in Hernández’s chapter, were creating a new, diverse audience. According to Acree, this performance marked the formation of the first of hundreds of Creole social clubs in Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. He traces the way these clubs intersected with urbanization in the Rio de la Plata and, more specifically, with the tremendous popularity of Creole dramas. Creole dramas and the act of playing Creole (as Acree calls it) at these social clubs transformed the theater marketplace and urban space in Argentina and Uruguay. Acree’s chapter examines how they did so at the beginning of the twentieth century and demonstrates the necessity not only of creating performance spaces but of cultivating audiences. The process of creating public spaces beyond the theater or circus in which to envision new realities is certainly durational, to use Taylor’s term, and the slow building of a theater- and performancegoing public, but also of a public open to street and other spectacles, leads to many other benefits, including a stronger civil society. There were even fundraisers (e.g., for schools) and other events that brought communities together in new ways. By taking performances to the urban stage, the Creole social clubs allowed for popular culture and people from different walks of life to participate in and inform public life. Performance is almost always parodic, even when not necessarily humorous. Such is the case in chapter 4, “Kinetic Dissidence and the New Queer Carnivalesque in Contemporary Brazil,” in which Pablo Assumpção Costa studies the recent phenomenon of queer public parties in Northeast Brazil, one of the deadliest places in the world for LGBTQ+ communities. Costa explains to an international audience how these dissident performances have acquired the force of political activism; and he explores how the spatial and bodily dissidence in the counterpublic enactments of the party called Carnaval no Inferno (Carnival in Hell) reveals and restores a traditionally political use of carnival aesthetics as a form of activism. That is, they subvert the whitewashed, mainstream Carnival with a carnival of belonging and resistance. Carnival in Brazil is rife with social meaning and symbolism for LGBTQ+-identified people and other marginalized groups, which are forced to endure multiple forms of institutional rejection and social negativity. Costa argues that carnivalesque performativity is historically marked by political commentary and microactivism in public space, and so it is significant that in the city of Fortaleza the carnivalesque has

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become a mode of political action for the new queer generations throughout the year, not only during the official four-day holiday preceding Lent. This contrasts with the official Carnival image, which certainly provides for some sociocultural subversion but has also come to be governed by what Costa calls the “happy encounter narrative” that is ultimately buttressed by racial, gender, socioeconomic, and other key factors. Similar to Costa’s argument that there is a conservative side to Carnival that merits a critical eye, Gastón Alzate and Paola Marín, in “Absent Bodies and Melted Weapons: Art and Social Change in Contemporary Colombia,” provide an important reminder that the political left is not always synonymous with progressivism, since both the leftist guerrilla group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the right-wing paramilitary have wreaked havoc on the people of Colombia. In chapter 5 they offer two examples of the response to guerrilla and paramilitary violence. The first consists of a group of Afro-Colombian female singers from Pogue, a rural area of the Colombian Pacific, who have reinvented traditional mourning songs (alabaos). Their music refers to the massacres and various abuses committed by both the FARC and the paramilitary in the village of Bojayá. These traditional singers have been invited to perform in official events related to the recent Colombian peace process and thus have now become one of its main symbols. Alzate and Marín underscore the idea that performance studies, as a field, offers insights but does not explain the origins of performances like those of the Pogue singers that underscore repetition but also that take on new forms after the traumatic events experienced in their community. The second example Alzate and Marín offer is Fragments, the art installation/permanent performance art space that world-renowned Colombian artist Doris Salcedo created in Bogota with the weapons FARC guerrilla fighters gave up as part of the peace process. Through these two creative practices, Alzate and Marín shed light on the relationship between progressive politics and creative activism in connection to the peace negotiations between the former government of Juan Manuel Santos and the FARC. It would be impossible to discuss the many activist creative practices taking place over seventy years of the Colombian armed conflict. Nevertheless, the authors consider both the Pogue singers and Doris Salcedo to be key examples of progressive public performances whose function is to witness, watch, and make visible the basic human need for memory, reparation, and peace. Alzate and Marín show that countering necropolitics is an ever-present need and that the courage to do so is a dominant feature of Colombian artists and activists. For the authors of this chapter, there is no need to discuss at length the relationship between politics and art: they are one. As the title of Tiffany D. Creegan Miller’s chapter suggests, politics are also personal. In “Queering Abiayala: Personal and Political Cartographies of the Indigenous Americas,” she writes about Manuel Tzoc Bucup, a

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performance artist and visual poet of K’iche’ Maya descent based in Guatemala City whose work advances the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, intersex, asexual, and allied Indigenous identities in Guatemala. As one of the leading pioneers advocating for LGBTIQ+ identities in his country, Manuel Tzoc Bucup has positioned his cultural production at the service of the promotion of people’s rights and representation. While Tzoc Bucup has published handmade poetry books and created numerous visual and performance pieces, Miller’s focus is on his performance art at the intersection of queer and pan-Indigenous identities. For example, Tzoc Bucup collaborated with Chilean performance artist Rodrigo Arenas Carter to create and stage The Reestablishment of Abya Yala, which centers on the politics of queerness transcending geopolitical borders to establish a dialogue among Indigenous communities across the hemisphere. As an artist and activist, Tzoc Bucup has created artisan books and performance art that explicitly address themes of gender and sexuality and have advanced LGBTIQ+ rights, ultimately contributing to changes in the sociopolitical milieu in his native Guatemala. While the struggle is ongoing, in Guatemala there have been advances in recent years. Perhaps most notable is the 2016 election of the first openly gay legislator, Sandra Morán, to the Guatemalan Congress. The election of Morán, a member of the leftleaning political party Convergence, was momentous, particularly given the conservative stance of Guatemala on LGBTIQ+ issues. While consensual, noncommercial homosexual sexual activity has been legal since 1871, Guatemala has yet to join other countries in Latin America where same-sex marriage is legally recognized (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador), and protections for gender and sexual orientation are not part of the country’s antidiscrimination laws. Beyond politics, there have also been advances for queer Guatemalans through cultural initiatives that provide a symbolic space to discuss issues of gender and sexuality. Haiti has a long history of performances that create this same type of inclusive space for marginalized people to raise their voices. Chapter 7, Cécile Accilien’s essay “Music, Poetry, and Créolité in the Songs of Carole Demesmin, Singer, Troubadour, and Activist,” focuses on giving voice to women of Haiti, specifically by highlighting the artistry of Carole Demesmin, who uses performance to reclaim women’s role in history. In doing so, Demesmin subverts multiple hierarchies—for example, when she eschews monolingualism and “purity” by singing her own songs or songs by the multifaceted artist Jean-Claude Martineau in Creole instead of French, or when she calls for all Haitians to become civically engaged, the topic of many of the songs she sings. Starting her chapter by writing about a foundational (and highly performative) 1791 Vodou ceremony, presided over by a woman in which slaves took an oath to gain freedom or perish, Accilien reminds the reader of the power of performance to envision different pasts and futures. In the centuries that followed this eighteenthcentury ceremony, women in Haiti continued to be relentlessly marginalized

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even though politicians in their discourses proclaimed that they were the backbone of Haitian society. Because of Haiti’s highly patriarchal society, women are still prevented from being fully involved in certain types of activism, and their roles in the political sphere are very limited. Through a study of Demesmin’s work, Accilien lays bare the necessity to reinsert women into Haitian history and the ways performances—and particularly those by Demesmin—reinstate forgotten women like Défilée, Catherine Flon, and Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, among others, in order to transform Haiti, since to include women in the past is to include them in the present. While Accilien makes clear that the room for women in Haiti’s activist political sphere is limited, performance, instigated by formal or informal training and religious ritual, can have an enormous impact on daily life. Chapter 8, “An Island in Crisis: Theater Groups and Social Change in Puerto Rico in the New Millennium,” by Priscilla Meléndez, is about collectives in Puerto Rico that, like many others across the continent, pushed for a more collaborative, experimental, and, at the same time, accessible theater that promoted community involvement. Indeed, groups Meléndez focuses on, like Agua, Sol y Sereno and Y No Había Luz, brought about in Puerto Rico a change seen in much of the Americas: theater and performance became participatory, impacting both artists and laypeople, who in many cases were one and the same. Meléndez contextualizes and explores the role played by theater collectives as they contribute to change the terms of the island’s political, social, and cultural debates, particularly at the dawn of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium, and in the midst of an economic crisis that has affected Puerto Rico’s stability and future. The chapter examines two groups that have created a sense of social and artistic responsibility utilizing different performative strategies—puppets, humor, marches, food, the Internet—that not only integrate but also transform the paradigms of the theater groups of the 1970s and 1980s. The activism of these groups can be identified in the contexts of urban revitalization, the concern for the environment, the prioritizing of pedagogical strategies through workshops, and the opening of and access to artistic venues, among others. But this activism has been dramatically challenged in the most unexpected way: on September 20, 2018, a category 5 hurricane that destroyed most of the island and made evident the fragility of a society still living under colonial power and subject to the decisions of juntas and governments outside the island. After the devastation of Hurricane María, Puerto Rico’s theater collectives are not only expanding their activism, but they are also reformulating the next steps in their goal to provoke major social, political, economic, and artistic transformations on the island. In chapter 9, “Performing the Revolution: Castro’s Cuba,” Marta Caminero-Santangelo affirms that to see Fidel Castro’s rise to power and more than half a century of control over Cuba in terms of theatrical metaphors is not uncommon, since few North American leaders have had as acute a sense of the symbolic and psychological power of performance. Some sources even talk of a little-known (and certainly apocryphal) chapter

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in Castro’s biography: his supposed short-lived career as an extra and aspiring movie actor in Mexican film, and even a reported one-line role, cut from the final production, in a Hollywood film, in the 1940s. Notwithstanding these apocryphal stories, Castro’s performative skills were put to great effect in his career as a revolutionary and, eventually, as a political leader. He was acutely aware of staging and costume in the years leading up to his takeover of Cuba’s government, when he was still a revolutionary aspiring to overturn the authoritarian dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. His self-conscious concern with both his own performance and the theater of amassed, wildly cheering throngs of supporters manifested itself from the early period of the new regime—in his dramatic victory entrance to Havana on a tank on January 8, 1959, wearing his typical costume of military fatigues to mark himself as a common soldier of the people and aided by the prop of white doves, or his many subsequent hours-long speeches to enormous crowds (who did not ever seem to tire) in the Plaza de la Revolución. His performances, in turn, led Cubans to develop performative responses, for example, the raising of one’s hand during a political rally as a “vote” in favor of the revolution. The participation in the public sphere, argues Caminero-Santangelo, created space for parodic and other activist engagements. Examining the origins and forms of mass demonstration in juxtaposition to one another allows her to explore the commonalities of the revolution’s leftist and progressive performances, which inspired much of Latin America, and more authoritarian and repressive stagings that, just as significantly although in different ways, changed the Americas. Antonio Prieto Stambaugh, in “The Queer/Muxe Performance of Disappearance: Lukas Avedaño’s Butterfly Utopia,” writes about the current struggle of muxe artist Lukas Avendaño is enduring in order to trace his disappeared brother. Chapter 10 ties in with the ongoing drama faced by thousands of families in Mexico and other countries in Latin America, as well as the ways conceptual and performance artists have been addressing this crisis since the dirty wars of the Cold War era. For example, groups like Proceso Pentágono y Taller de Investigación Plástica took up the crisis of the disappearance of political activists through various actions between 1973 and 1979. Víctor Muñoz, of Proceso Pentágono, recounts that the group performed faux kidnappings in which a member of the group was gagged and disappeared. What is notable about Avedaño’s performance is the way he queers the repertoire of activist demonstrations to demand justice for the families of the disappeared. Prieto Stambaugh poses a question asked by Peruvian artist Emilio Santisteban (“What role does body art play in a country of disappeared bodies?”) and employs the example of a specific case, the disappearance of Avendaño’s brother, Bruno Alonso Avendaño Martínez. Following the ideas of Mexican performance theorist Ileana Diéguez, Prieto Stambaugh posits the idea of “a communitas of pain” as a way to invoke absent bodies and to express indignation but also to demand

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justice. The variety of performances that Prieto Stambaugh considers in this chapter demonstrate Avendaño’s broad repertoire, which in turn underscores the need to approach the search for justice from numerous directions. The remains of Lukas Avedaño’s brother were recently discovered, allowing for the family’s painful process of mourning to begin. Alan Filewod’s essay “‘Why Are the Canadian Authorities Afraid of This Play?’ Eight Men Speak and Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada,” the eleventh and final chapter, is a detailed case study of the performance and subsequent banning of a high-profile Communist agitprop in Toronto in 1934. Filewod identifies one of the clearest examples of a performance that led to significant political change: in the aftermath of the inflammatory 1919 general strike in Winnipeg, the Canadian government passed an amendment to the criminal code, which made it a criminal offense to “teach, advocate, advise or defend” any organization that “teaches, advocates, advises or defends the use of force, violence, terrorism, or physical injury to person or property [in order to] bring about any governmental, industrial or economic change within Canada.” Broad in scope and draconian in execution, Section 98 was a blunt instrument in the hands of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the newly formed federal political police force. Initially used to arrest and deport suspected radical subversives and unionists, Section 98 was the instrument employed in 1931 to effectively ban the Communist Party of Canada. In dawn raids across the country, the RCMP arrested eight senior members of the party, including its charismatic leader, Tim Buck. In late 1934, Oscar Ryan, founder of the Progressive Arts Club, suggested that the workers’ theater stage a play about the arrest of the eight Communists. The result was a five-act agitprop, Eight Men Speak, written by a collective of four authors, including Ryan. Part documentary, part mock trial, and part political pageant, Eight Men Speak was an inventive and early example of the living newspaper genre. Even before the play opened on December 4 with a cast of radical students and unemployed workers, the Toronto Police Commission had decided to suppress the play and ordered detectives to take notes during the performance. The police report and a dossier on the cast members were then sent to the prime minister of Canada, who ordered that the play be banned. The Toronto police warned the theater owner that he would lose his operating license if there were more performances. The play was canceled; several months later in Winnipeg, police used the same tactic to prevent a subsequent production. Finally, the attorney general ordered that the published text of the play be banned from the mails. As Filewod demonstrates in his chapter, the banning of the play was the best possible outcome for progressives, who seized the opportunity to use it as the catalyst for an intensified public campaign against Section 98. Taken together, the chapters that follow—and the multiple performances readers themselves have experienced on their own, some of which they will

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recall as they read—point to the power of performances that work for the common good. There are multiple key commonalities among the chapters: for example, the use of the concept of necropolitics, Achille Mbembe’s theorization that goes beyond Michel Foucault’s idea of biopolitics (power over life) to consider the power of exposure to death; the questioning, inverting, complementing, or rejection of the Western concept of performance studies; examples of activists and their impact on judicial systems; the need to create and expand audiences; a profound understanding that oftentimes, given physical and other risks, the performance is the change; and the overwhelming knowledge that countercultural performers face the daunting challenge of presenting new realities in contentious spaces. There is much that the following chapters do not share, as well, which makes for a collection that is both unified and varied in its presentation of performances that change the Americas. If the reader is not convinced by the examples that follow, one more plea is in order. As I ask my students to do, imagine a world without the study of literature, art, history, philosophy, languages, and so forth. Doing so immediately makes their power become evident. The same goes for performance: imagine a world without the courageous performers highlighted in the pages of this book.

Bibliography Boyd, Andrew, and Dave Oswald Mitchell. Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution. New York: OR Books, 2016. Canady, Darren. “Meditation 2020.” In Virtual Vigil. Lawrence: University of Kansas. June 10, 2020. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbBJIqmj4Jk. Canady, Darren. Personal interview, November 18, 2020. Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “The Case for Reparations.” The Atlantic, June 16, 2020, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/. Giroux, Henry A. Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 2000. Griswold del Castillo, Richard. “The Birth of La Causa.” In César Chávez: A Brief Biography With Documents, edited by Richard W. Etulian. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2002, 82–95. Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. New York: Routledge, 1995. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. “Jesusa Rodríguez se viste de senadora.” http://revistaunderground.com.ar/jesusarodriguez-se-viste-de-senadora-mexicana-el-de-amlo-tiene-que-ser-un-gobierno-dealta-vanguardia/. Levy, Jacques E., and César Chávez. Cesar Chavez Autobiography of La Causa. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Mbembe, Joseph-Achille, and Steve Corcoran. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. McMillen, Neil R. “Street Theater and the Collapse of Jim Crow: How the Black Freedom Movement Outsmarted Mississippi Segregationists.” Mississippi History

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Now | Articles, Mississippi Historical Society, Feb. 2008, http://mshistorynow. mdah.state.ms.us/articles/280/index.php?s=articles. Miller, Michael. “The Racist History of the 'Crisis Actor' Attacks on Parkland School Shooting Survivors.” Washington Post, June 12, 2020. www.washingtonpost. com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/02/23/the-racist-roots-of-the-crisis-actors-label/. Rodríguez, Jesusa. Personal interview, June 19, 2008. Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright Publishing, 2017. Schulman, Michael. “The Spring Awakening of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Theatre Kids.” The New Yorker, April 17, 2018, www.newyorker.com/culture/ cultural-comment/the-spring-awakening-of-the-stoneman-douglas-theatre-kids. Taylor, Diana. Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2016. Valdez, Luis. Early Works. Houston: Arte Público Press, 1994.

2

Playing Creole: circus dramas, the theater marketplace, and urban society in Argentina and Uruguay William Acree Washington University in St. Louis

In late May 1894, the dean of the University of the Republic’s Faculty of Medicine in Montevideo gathered with a handful of friends at a small ranch on the outskirts of the city to enjoy a fiesta criolla, which meant plenty of dancing, eating, and music. Decked out in gaucho regalia, the group had paraded on horseback through the city’s streets, past the elegant new Parisian-style buildings, gathering some 200 followers along the way. The next day, this group officially launched the Sociedad Criolla, led by Elías Regules (the dean, known within the sociedad as “nuestro patriarca”). They did so at the circus tent of the region’s preeminent circus family that had rocketed to fame for its Creole dramas (dramas criollos), which told stories of native sons seeking to avenge their honor against a corrupt state. Following the ceremony, they all rode back to the ranch for another meal, then disbanded and went about their routines. Thus was born the first Creole social club in the region—still in existence today. Over the next three decades, several hundred of these social clubs formed in Uruguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil. They were intimately related to the urbanizing experience in the Rio de la Plata, characterized by rapid population growth from the 1870s through the first decade of the new century, largely owing to the arrival of immigrants from western Europe and dynamic economic development propelled by grain exports, foreign invest­ ment in rail lines, ports, and other types of infrastructure expansion and services.1 The social clubs were also inseparable from the Creole drama phenomenon that had inspired a theatergoing public in the region. And they allowed members to engage in theatricality and performance outside of theater and circus venues, by staging plays at club headquarters, in open fields, or, as was more often the case, through ceremonies of playing Creole, like Regules and friends did, in town squares and parading down avenues and city streets. Coupled with the entertainment power that Creole dramas had acquired throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Creole club theatricality contributed to growing the region’s theatergoing public and marketplace for performance, specifically theatrical entertainment. These events at Creole societies as well as the Creole dramas themselves presented a palpable, visual tension. On one hand, they harnessed and DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-2

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Figure 2.1 With the goal of creating the society clear in mind, members of the Sociedad Criolla pose along the paseo criollo for a picture in May 1894. Note the onlookers who are climbing the fence to watch the enthusiasts pass by, offering an improvised spectacle along the rural route. With the proliferation of the Creole social clubs came a significant increase in the number of similar spectacles on dirt roads, in town squares, and in city centers. Sociedad Criolla Elías Regules, Montevideo, Uruguay.

projected notions of tradition, embodied in the nostalgia for rural life that Regules and like-minded society members referenced consistently as their call to action and celebrated through the transformation of the gaucho into a national icon and antimodern hero. On the other hand, their emphasis on tradition clashed with the new, the modern, that inhabitants of both countries could not escape in the freshly erected apartment and office buildings and multiplying storefronts, all following European architectural styles; in the newly constructed wide avenues orienting flows of people through public space; and in the daily rhythms of life, felt in the workplace, in the migration of rural inhabitants to cities, and in the increased velocity of social and economic exchanges (Figure 2.1). Yet far from extravagant displays of nativism or simple leisure activities, Creole dramas and the act of playing Creole at these social clubs trans­ formed the theater marketplace by multiplying places and types of perfor­ mance as well as expanding the makeup of audiences. When the social clubs literally stopped the flow of carriages or streetcars or captivated the atten­ tion of passersby, they made urban public space their stage. And when circus troupes took their dramatic shows from town to town, city to city, or, be­ ginning in the 1930s, to the airwaves, they played a central role in solidifying

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a regional performance network connecting the port capitals of Buenos Aires and Montevideo with smaller cities and towns linked by or close to the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers. More than two dozen locations in Uruguay and Argentina made up the core of this circuit, with a handful of outlying destinations in Brazil and in northwestern Argentina. This network was part of the growing cultural market in which forms of entertainment were among the most well-consumed goods. This chapter examines what it meant to play Creole at this moment and the impacts circus dramas and gaucho social clubs had on the transformation of everyday life. A final general point about playing Creole requires mention here. Gaucho dramas and the social clubs that allowed members to play gaucho on weekends and tap into the nostalgia of a rural past were intensely local experiences. That is, beyond the vitality of the plays in Argentina and Uruguay, as well as the explosive growth and continued presence of Creole societies in these countries and in Brazil, which was now home to the largest number of such associations (Oliven), there was not a phenomenon of si­ milar magnitude elsewhere in Latin America. The closest example of an analogous cultural icon is the charro in Mexico, which featured in latenineteenth-century Mexican novels and made an occasional appearance at circuses. The popularization of the charro as a national antimodern hero did not occur until after the Mexican Revolution in the early twentieth century, through film, music, comics, and state support for charro-inspired organi­ zations (Conway; Day). In spite of the Creole being a local regional phenomenon, it also drew from decades of hemispheric entertainment flows and exchanges throughout the Americas. From the 1820s through the end of the century, with the decades of the 1860s, ’70s, and ’80s constituting the apex, continuous streams of US performers made their way to South America, with the Rio de la Plata being a premier destination, given the proximity of multiple per­ formance locations and continuously growing audiences. These travelers literally reshaped performance landscapes by establishing patterns of movement from one locale to another, laying the foundation for the per­ formance circuit that grew stronger by the year. Many of the individuals and companies that came from the United States put on acrobatic and eques­ trian shows. Some, like the Carlo Brothers or Spalding and Rogers’s com­ pany, were full-fledged circus companies that performed for years on end in the region. Their engagement with equestrian marvels, which allowed them to hire local talent, was one key to their success. The flows of these performers from the United States likewise facilitated news of the Wild West shows that grew in popularity across the United States—and the world—beginning in the 1880s. The nativist spirit that was so powerful in Wild West shows (with white characters like Buffalo Bill always defeating their “savage” foes) and that tied into the frontier expan­ sion narrative of the United States had a parallel in Creole dramas. Gaucho toughs were not going head to head against indigenous groups in the plays,

Playing Creole

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but they, too, rode a wave of popular sentiment that plugged into questions about the rights of citizenship and the transformation of rural work in modern world economies. Ironically, the main performers of these “national dramas,” as they were often billed, were immigrants and their descendants. Quite literally, then, these were shows that performed the transformation of the Americas. And when the dramas infused the actions and attitudes of Creole society members, they performed such transformation regularly, out in the “real” world. I want to set the scene for this moment at the end of the nineteenth century in which the Creole, loosely defined as the spirit of the local, gained increasing strength throughout the Rio de la Plata region. This was so much the case that lo criollo became a driving force behind a sense of loyalty to the nation as well as a distinct mark of regional identity. Creole dramas were the primary promoters of this spirit and engaged people from across social sectors at play venues and beyond, where the influences of the spectacles continued to resonate. For those who are unfamiliar with Creole dramas, these were short plays born among traveling circus troupes in the mid-1880s. The spark for the genre was an 1884 dramatic adaptation of Eduardo Gutiérrez’s best-selling narrative titled Juan Moreira, published first serially in La Patria Argentina in late 1879 and early 1880. Moreira was a publishing success, moving quickly to book form and launching the protagonist as the region’s most famous gaucho. In contrast to the more often cited fictionalized gaucho hero from José Hernández’s epic poem El Gaucho Martín Fierro (1872; 1879), which also became fodder for popular dramas later, Moreira was a real-life outlaw. And while the 1884 pantomime adaptation was a hit, it was the new version from 1886, with dialogue incorporated, that not only catapulted the story to unimaginable levels of fame but also led to the Creole drama movement. Over the following decade, roughly a dozen similar plays captured audiences around the region. These were often based on or inspired by gauchesque narratives and poetry that had circulated previously, like Fierro or another of Gutiérrez’s narratives, Santos Vega. The stories quickly became the main attraction of circus shows, capping off a night of equestrian stunts, deathdefying acrobatics, music, and generally off-the-wall stuff. Though specta­ tors enjoyed those other elements, what they most sought was the Creole drama. By the early to mid-1890s, the Creole drama phenomenon was not only attracting ranch hands, stonecutters, or dockworkers, it also drew politicians, doctors, and lawyers and was literally the talk of the town in place after place. For more than a decade, from the mid-1880s through the mid-1890s, the plays were among the most well attended entertainment options, and they resulted in longlasting theatrical careers for many of their performers. One of the results of this quick rise to prominence of a series of plays depicting rural life and the frontier on stage was the establishment of the Creole as representative of individual and collective struggle, wrapped up in

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the aforementioned notion of regional identity. Significantly, though, state power as well as local politics were largely absent here, which is especially intriguing given the emotional power of the Creole and the icon’s ability to convey a sense of belonging across time. In fact, the complex process that I am here calling “playing Creole,” which involved the Creole drama phe­ nomenon, Creole societies, and engagement with themes, meanings, and activities in other areas of public life, revolved around the economics of the theater marketplace, the role of play in creating a sense of community, and the power of popular culture to shape everyday behaviors. A handful of examples from the theater will help bring this point into sharper focus. In January 1894, at the height of the Creole drama phenomenon, a writer for the local paper in the small town of Salto, Uruguay, described a fasci­ nation with the plays—by far the best-selling entertainment option in town at the time—that went beyond merely attending. The writer noted that Santos Vega, Juan Cuello, and Juan Moreira had been especially hot topics among residents of the countryside, who “so thoroughly enjoy treatments of the traditional gaucho type and Creole themes.” You must hear people talking about the dramas, continued the note, to get a sense of their en­ thusiasm. “They relate the smallest details of Vega’s or Moreira’s outfits, their bravery when under attack. They all speak at once, interrupting and correcting each other …. There is no lack of men who try to imitate gestures and inflections of Creole drama protagonists.” Other reporters highlighted the presence of the city’s “most distinguished ladies,” who, day in and day out, added “brilliance” to each function with the “perfume of their souls” and “angelic glances.” When the “brave” José Podestá appeared on horse­ back as Juan Cuello, Juan Moreira, or another gaucho hero, these excited theatergoers exclaimed, “‘Ah, criollo!,’ applauding frenetically.”2 The region’s press often celebrated José Podestá and his circus company for spearheading “the reproduction of the beautiful traditions from our countryside” and for “resurrecting the gaucho in all his forms” (quoted in Klein, 15). There was at least truth in the part about the company spear­ heading the initiative. The Podestá-Scotti company, which brought together several members of the Podestá family with members of another local fa­ mily, became the region’s most successful Creole drama troupe. They en­ joyed exclusive performance rights for new plays from Elías Regules (who was an author in addition to being the dean of the medical school and Creole society pioneer), among other writers, and they kept a rigorous schedule, staging upwards of 200 shows per year, year after year, on the regional circuit. And even after the Creole drama craze subsided, the com­ pany’s performers continued on in show business, thanks to the visibility and reputations they had acquired from putting frontiers on stage. In his memoirs, the company leader José Podestá reflected on some of the broad influences of Creole dramas, proclaiming: “How many young people changed their behaviors because of Creole dramas? Without these plays,

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how many authors and artists would have followed a different path in life?” (Podestá, 78–79). The writers for that small-town paper, Podestá, and the playgoers whose enthusiasm was on display in Salto and elsewhere underscore the transfor­ mative power of playing Creole. Part of this power stemmed from economic and demographic shifts that the region experienced in the last third of the 1800s. Stories about unfairness, the plight of the downtrodden, or correcting the system—all big themes in gaucho dramas—resounded with people from a variety of backgrounds, from immigrants seeking a chance at success to rural migrants who settled on the outskirts of cities or in their urban core in hopes of new work opportunities (Marial, 60–65). The significance of playing Creole hinged on converting what was my­ thical, fantastic, fictional, or even downright exaggerated into something concrete, real, and therefore true. What was at stake when Creole drama goers imitated the heroes on stage? Such imitation was a telling sign of how the dramas exercised their pull after the curtain fell. Throughout the last decade and a half of the century, police records in Buenos Aires and Montevideo evidence spectators charging stages to defend gaucho heroes, men (and occasionally women) getting into tiffs outside circus venues, and Moreira-like figures appearing in chronicles of delinquency, labeled as “Moreiras.” Florencio Sánchez, who was one of the Creole drama phe­ nomenon’s harshest critics and also the region’s most celebrated playwright, wrote of the strong pull toward mimicry of masculine toughness. “For a moment, taking on the police squad was a sort of fantasy close to reality in the popular imagination. Who knows if many of us can claim innocence from having engaged in that youthful game of pretending to dole out, with our wooden knives, as many blows as Moreira did” (Sánchez, 44). Moreover, what was at play when the dramas’ by-products, such as pulp fiction, slang, or musical influences, became commercial success stories? The consumers of those by-products were embracing a sense of authenticity based on embellishment or even fantasy. That very embrace of the Creole, however much it was rooted in nostalgia, hyperbole, or pure fiction, ren­ dered it real and sincere—let’s say transformative. It was that conversion of the fanciful into reality and the ability of fantasy to convey essential truth that made the spread, generalized acceptance of, and participation in the Creole spirit—or playing Creole—so consequential during these years. We can point to instances that reveal the Creole spirit taking hold. One of these was the growing presence of the popular where the elite had previously reigned, with the popular effectively being synonymous with the Creole (Adamovsky). By the early 1890s, for example, it was common to see Creole dramas at venues where opera and formal theater had been the predominant forces. It was precisely the popularity of these dramas that had allowed them to move from circus tents and open-air spaces to the region’s most upscale per­ formance venues, like Montevideo’s Teatro Solís and Buenos Aires’s Teatro de la Opera. The countryside on stage certainly made for a theater experience that

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was more aligned with local references than what opera, theater, or even ac­ robatic performances had provided during previous decades. It was in part through such local color that Creole dramas marshaled the emotional charge often ascribed to them, occasionally in negative terms (riling up spectators; promoting disdain for state officials; being mistakenly considered representative of “national” culture), at others in a more positive light (the shows seemed so movingly real; they brought gaucho icons to life; and they launched captivating performance careers). This emotional current was on display in the local music that permeated these plays, too. Local musicians accompanied circus troupes, playing Creole airs and folk tunes. A standard musical feature of the shows was the payada scene, where troubadours competed against one another in im­ provised verse and guitar lines. Gauchos were often consummate troubadours. Some of these singers became virtuosos in their own right, like Gabino Ezeiza, the Afro-Argentine whose talents won him entire acts as well as separate shows for himself. Figures like Ezeiza became celebrated representatives of the Creole spirit. Beyond local color, payadas and folk tunes easily conveyed meanings of tradition and served as links to community identity. The same was true of the folk dances that were included in shows. The pericón and other regional dances, like the gato, the minué, the cielito, and the tango africano (sometimes called simply tango), conveyed core notions of tradition.3 These were local dances for the most part, though the cielito has variations in other areas of Latin America. Attendees knew them well, and when the performance space allowed it, dance scenes invited and inspired audience participation. Dances were often advertised as bailes nacionales in play announcements, though they, like the music, were very much a trans­ national phenomenon practiced in both Argentina and Uruguay. The tango eventually received another level of international attention and, as a result, of modification. Its movement to Paris and New York in the 1910s, by which time it had jumped from the Creole drama stage to the neighborhood dance hall before returning to the Rio de la Plata, gave the dance a new, refined allure (Archetti; Viladrich). Tango aside, the impact of these folk dances was not just confined to the circus tent or theater. Thanks to the rising popularity such dances enjoyed because of their inclusion as prized Creole drama numbers, they appeared in other entertainment areas and spaces of association, like dance halls and wealthier social circles, where in the mid-1890s the pericón nacional became the dance of the day. In fact, the pericón offers a microexample of a performance that trans­ formed modes of social interaction beyond the theater, again thanks to its initial visibility and promotion on theatrical stages. In 1889 the PodestáScotti company began incorporating the pericón into its performances, first in Juan Moreira and then in other dramas. It quickly moved from being a Uruguayan dance for two, practiced in a leisurely manner in the countryside and in small gatherings, to being the representative national dance on stage in both Uruguay and Argentina. Creole drama companies added pericones to their shows to boost sagging audience numbers and liven up otherwise

Playing Creole

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less dynamic experiences. Consider an assessment of the dance in the Paysandú, Uruguay, daily El Paysandú. There an author reflected on the place of folk dances in the town’s theater and social scenes, noting that “with their corresponding gatos and pericones these plays have produced a renaissance of certain customs that European civilization had forced us to hide. Now, the pericón is going to become the dance of choice in the most aristocratic salons of Buenos Aires and Montevideo.” The writer went on, citing a Buenos Aires publication that called attention to the dance beyond the theater, too. “The great novelty in our dance halls this winter is the pericón nacional” (El Paysandú, Feb. 7, 1895). In the span of a handful of years, then, we can observe how this social dance, a pastime in rural settings, was incorporated into the Creole drama world to warm reception, which led to it becoming not only a lifeline for companies otherwise struggling to attract spectators but also an activity that allowed urban denizens to so­ cialize and effectively play Creole. The case of the pericón underscores a central feature of Creole dramas and the broader process of playing Creole: they were inseparable from forms of sociability that were growing more dynamic and diverse by the year. Creole dramas were social events por excelencia. They provided leisure spaces not just for adults but for entire families; ticket prices allowed couples to attend relatively inexpensively, while children often entered for half price or for free. Show times (especially matinee performances on weekends), warm-up acts designed for younger viewers, and scenes with child perfor­ mers likewise invited family outings. These spaces in turn helped shape spectators’ understandings of the social connections knitting together var­ ious types of communities, from neighborhood to nation, and of their roles within each. The forms of association that Creole dramas facilitated were key in this respect, and they spilled over into other areas of public life, like carnival and, as we saw with the pericón, dance. In all of these social spaces, class and ethnic divisions were crossed regularly. Moreover, it was precisely the circus tent or theater, the carnival comparsa and costume competitions, and the connections made through dance gatherings where the pericón or similar social dances were being practiced that facilitated cross-class, mul­ tiethnic, and multiracial interaction in ways that often did not transpire in areas lacking the Creole as a driving force. The ramifications of social frontiers mixing were profound on several levels. To signal some of the most salient, in addition to being founding and long-standing members of Creole circus troupes themselves, immigrants attended the shows regularly, in part to experience a sense of belonging and in part because the plays offered an inexpensive and ubiquitous entertain­ ment option. At these dramas, personal memories of the performances fused with collective ones and endured in ways that recollections of operas, zar­ zuelas, or other spectacles did not. Simply put, theatergoers were hard pressed to identify an opera or zarzuela story line or protagonist—or, for that matter, one from the long list of plays by European authors performed

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in the 1880s and 1890s—that carried the cultural capital and persisted in the collective imagination like a Juan Moreira, Martín Fierro, or Santos Vega did. When cigarette makers sought new names for their brands or cultural references to advertise their products, they turned to the Creole drama landscape. Moreover, class, racial, and ethnic divisions were readily crossed at Creole drama benefit shows for a range of causes (such as fundraising for an Italian school; recognition of an immigrant performer; solidarity with a local cause or initiative; disaster relief). Benefit shows, which often sold out, pointed to an emergent sense of community bonds and the place of the Creole in fomenting these. That sense of community is what allowed the fanciful plots of the plays to hold kernels of truth for diverse audiences. The dramas, with their high attendance numbers, were not alone in this regard, though. Balls and carnival offer some of the best illustrations of how forms of association spread from the sites of the dramas outward. Toward the end of the century, the main places for these balls were the very same theaters across the region where Creole dramas roused audiences. Balls also offered moments for Creole-circus-inflected music to be heard, like the pericón or the “happy habanera” titled “Juan Moreira”4 (Figure 2.2). Even more than balls, carnival activities involving costumes and compe­ titions between parade groups illustrate the significance of playing Creole in urban public spaces. In the last third of the century, each February carnival offered residents across the Rio de la Plata a prime moment for socializing, civic expression, and engagement with Creole sympathies. By the late 1870s, costumed dance comparsas had become a staple feature. Among the most popular costumes and characters these comparsas took up were varying versions of Cocoliche, Moreira, and other theatrical gaucho heroes (see Darío). Cocoliche was a popular character woven into Creole dramas from 1890 on who represented an immigrant (most often Italian, though there were French and Basque Cocoliches, too) trying to make in the Rio de la Plata, trying to fit in. Cocoliches improvised much in their roles, though these revolved around slapstick humor and a garbled mix of Spanish and Italian (or occasionally another language). The numbers lasted as long as audiences kept laughing, and they were generally warmly received. There was certainly an element of ethnic and racial negotiation at work as im­ migrants played gauchos during carnival across the region. Through this performance of Creoleness, many sought to escape the disparaging asso­ ciations of immigrants with biological (racial) inferiority swirling at the turn of the century, and, in the process, draw on the cultural capital of Creole whiteness, or the power of the Creole to bridge ethnic differences (Seigel, 66; Adamovsky, 52, 84–85). By the turn of the century, these Creole characters that had first circulated in print and later made the rounds through dramatic representation had become quite the carnival stars. We can observe the swirl of excitement around the Creole as well in the marketing methods traveling companies employed and in the influence Creole dramas had in the marketing of other cultural products and

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Figure 2.2 Cover of the eighth edition of Gerardo Grasso’s Pericón. Grasso’s ren­ dition of the music for the dance performed around the region was just one of many composers’ attempts to vie for the claim (and accompanying profits) to have written the definitive score for the baile nacional. Centro de Documentación Musical Lauro Ayestarán, Montevideo, Uruguay.

practices, like cigarettes, guitars, hairstyles for men, and carnival partici­ pation at the turn of the century. Circus troupes incorporated the Creole into their publicity materials and even their official names; artists were presented as “true criollos”; and from the early 1890s on, as Creole drama shows transitioned from circus tents to the formal space of theaters, they were billed as “national dramas of Creole traditions,” indicating the ac­ ceptance of the plays as legitimate representations of the nation. The Argentine cigarette manufacturer La Popular, for instance, which produced around 100,000 packs per day, churned out Juan Moreira, Martín Fierro, and Juan Cuello branded cigarettes, among its other labels, throughout the 1890s. Each of these brands produced collectible cards with scenes from the

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plays’ story lines and abbreviated captions—the Moreira series had twentytwo cards, Cuello, thirty-six, and Fierro, thirty.5 During the Podestá-Scotti company’s 1895 stay in Paysandú, they gave out Los Guachitos cigarettes at a performance of Elías Regules’s gaucho comedy Los Guachitos. Similarly, guitar sales rose to the hundreds of thousands per year; and the use of phrases from gauchesque characters and other Creole drama figures were deployed to promote the sale of wine (Prieto, 162; Caras y Caretas). The public embrace of this Creole spirit—in part a result of the emotional vibrations it emitted, in part an aspect of the cultural marketplace of the moment—transformed the stuff of myth, fantasy, and fiction seen on stages into real feelings, real behaviors, and real attachments to collective experiences and community; it made what we might see as exaggerated or invented notions of authenticity into sources of essential truth. State power was not behind this. And while nationalist threads run through the examples the chapter has pre­ sented thus far, these were secondary to performers and impresarios making a profit, audiences having fun, and veins of community loyalty forming in the process. An expanding theater marketplace was no doubt part of this story of theatrical success. Some numbers from Buenos Aires statistical reports, though incomplete, can help paint a portrait of this marketplace and the role circuses and Creole dramas had in it. In 1887, for example, at the outset of the Creole drama phenomenon, the city registered around 210,000 circus attendees among the total 1.5 million theater spectators for the year. In 1894, when the dramas were beginning to wane, circus dramas accounted for approximately 75,000 spectators of the total 1.7 million for the year (Dirección General 1894, 309; Dirección General 1895, 379). These figures did not, however, tally the shows put on by the PodestáScotti company (the region’s most celebrated and best-selling Creole drama group and the one that offered the greatest number of performances per year) or a handful of other high-volume companies. Nor do they show the reach of the shows beyond the city of Buenos Aires in the other locations on our performance circuit. Yet, given that in the period spanning from 1887 through 1895 Creole drama companies performed on average 600 shows per year on this circuit, the impact was larger than the municipal numbers let on. Similarly, the rapidly increasing number of entertainment spaces and ticket sales, especially from 1900 to 1920, point to the growth of a theatergoing public. From 1879 to the end of the century, twenty new theaters opened their doors in Buenos Aires. This number doubled by 1920, with ticket sales reaching nearly seven million (almost tripling since the end of the 1800s) for the city’s two million residents (Llanes 18–20; Mazziotti, “Bambalinas,” 74; Mazziotti, “El auge,” 76; González Velasco, 24). The same pattern of growth took place in Montevideo, and performance venues also opened in smaller cities like Salto and Paysandú in Uruguay and La Plata, Rosario, Santa Fe, and Córdoba in Argentina. The Creole drama phenomenon played a central role in stimulating this theater marketplace and in the

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formation of a theatergoing public that would endure long after the dramas had ceased to attract audiences. The phenomenon also fed into the proliferation of Creole societies, where playing Creole became the heart and soul of the members’ activities and where theatricality benefited from new pathways to transform urban society. This chapter began with the debut of the Sociedad Criolla Elías Regules on the outskirts of Montevideo in 1894. This was the same Regules who had written gauchesque poetry and some of the most successful Creole dramas (including Martín Fierro) and who was close to the Podestá family, so close that the official club launch occurred under the Podestá-Scotti tent. Regules’s Sociedad Criolla, which is the oldest such club still in existence, sparked the creation of hundreds of others. In Argentina the first societies date from 1899, and by the mid-1910s in Buenos Aires alone there were around fifty. Some 220 others had risen and fallen (Lehmann-Nitsche, 251–54). In Brazil’s southernmost state Creole societies formed at the turn of the century, too, though it was not until the mid-twentieth century when their numbers rose significantly (Oliven). The turn of the century was a watershed moment for the emergence of mutual aid societies and civil as­ sociations in the Rio de la Plata and elsewhere in Latin America (Sábato), and Creole social clubs were undoubtedly part of this wave of membershipbased groups. They were distinct from many of the others forming in the same years, though. They were not exclusively focused on ethnic identity, as clubs established by and for immigrant communities often were, and they did not typically offer legal or medical services to their members. Rather, they were social clubs. People gathered to eat, dance, engage in horseplay—literally, to dress up like gauchos and chinas—and, on occasion, enjoy a theatrical production staged at the club’s headquarters. These lei­ surely activities were serious. And the moments of theatricality, from the rural dress to the performance of plays to the public parades, were part of a concerted effort to invent or protect tradition. For members tradition was inseparable from a romanticized understanding of rural life, folkways, and modes of work and speech. Tradition was about loyalty. And its main­ tenance required plenty of performance. Almost all Creole societies had inaugural ceremonies, anniversary cele­ brations, and gatherings on national or civic holidays that were similar to those of the Sociedad Criolla that Elías Regules founded. The more regular meetings took place at a club’s headquarters, the size of which ranged from a small house to a group of buildings on a sizable parcel of land, either on the edges of urban locations or in the surrounding rural areas. Gatherings usually involved activities from the countryside: taba (a game played with animal knuckle bones), horse racing, sortija (a game where riders on horseback attempt to snag a hanging ring at full gallop), meals, dancing, music, and, of course, dressing up. Recreational activities allowed partici­ pants to escape from daily routines and hardships, similar to an outing to the theater. And while the lofty speeches and notions of bravery, honor,

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virility, and authenticity through gaucho dress carried a definitive ideolo­ gical charge, these clubs were at heart spaces to expand social networks. And they were gathering spots primarily for men, though women and children participated in activities, too. Creole society performances had varied audiences. Riding horses down the main city streets was a public spectacle, and crowds flocked to sidewalks, balconies, and rooftops to watch. Yet, more often than not, the show was for the other society members in the confines of the club headquarters. There members acted out stories they were telling about themselves—or those they wanted to believe. The size of those audiences for those moments of playing Creole are hard to measure. Membership records are scarce for the first several decades of these clubs, and numbers of attendees at parades are elusive or simply do not exist. What is clear, though, is that playing gaucho in public was a highly visible event that attracted crowds to the main squares of small towns, like Durazno or Treinta y Tres in Uruguay, or to line streets in the urban port capitals of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. Club members were aware they were putting on a show. At the same time, they believed in the value of representing tradition, which was linked to notions of the raza gaucha—a term used frequently among Creole society members in reference to the mythical idea of a race of gaucho “forefathers.” Society speakers regularly addressed the theme of this “gaucho race” losing its cultural purity and virility with the changes rapidly urbanizing societies were exacting on traditional (rural) forms of life. Despite the imaginary quality of this raza gaucha and the fact that the ways in which it was de­ ployed are better understood in line with a sense of ethnicity, the message of carrying on tradition, preserving cultural heritage in the face of urban change, and embodying strains of masculinity resonated with club members (Acree, 149–51). Therein lied the social function of playing Creole: it cele­ brated, promoted, and kept alive ideas of a heroic rural past that was the heart of the national story. Despite club activities being essentially play, they referenced authenticity in forms of dress and speech, ceremony and pomp, and participants had to look the part (Figures 2.3–2.5). Additional levels of theatricality came with the founding documents clubs drafted; the banners they designed and displayed; the patriarchs they cele­ brated; the coats of arms that made it onto flags and club documents; the trademark songs members sang together at a club’s headquarters and on their public outings; and so on. Today anyone who attends a Creole festival in the region (such as the Fiesta de la Patria Gaucha in Tacuarembó, Uruguay, or the Festival Nacional de Folklore de Cosquín in Argentina) will see these visual and symbolic elements as distinct markers of club identity meant for show. Likewise, print media, especially media with an important visual component, helped spread the word about playing Creole at the outset of the twentieth century. Dozens of illustrated magazines cir­ culated news of club activities, along with photographs of members.6 Lastly, other performances—specifically Creole dramas, including Juan Moreira or

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Figure 2.3 Looking the part, a member of the Sociedad Criolla poses for a photo­ graph in his gaucho attire. Note the painted background. Sociedad Criolla Elías Regules, Montevideo, Uruguay.

scenes from the plays—promoted the social values of playing Creole to Creole society members. The dramas added an element of metatheater to a club gathering, which, as we have seen, was already in itself full of perfor­ mance opportunities.

Conclusions At the end of the day, playing Creole at a Creole society was just that—play. Members spent a handful of hours together on the weekend or during an evening and then went about their daily routines, most of which took place

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Figure 2.4 Another member of the Sociedad Criolla poses for a photograph in his gaucho attire. Sociedad Criolla Elías Regules, Montevideo, Uruguay.

in urban centers. While the clubs did attract some members who had regular contact with country life, for most the playful activities and performances were the closest they would get to the countryside. Similarly, attending a swashbuckling gaucho drama in a circus tent or a more refined theater al­ lowed urban denizens to view stories of struggle and hardship that, while filtered through the lens of rural life, were not unlike the daily challenges many faced just trying to get by, often having to deal with injustices in the process. The dramatic humor delved into the shifting demographic makeup of the region and provoked theatergoers not just to laugh together but also to consider meaningful questions regarding ethnic tensions and relations.

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Figure 2.5 Members of the Sociedad Criolla prepare for a pericón in 1919. Regules accompanies the group, standing on the far left. Sociedad Criolla Elías Regules, Montevideo, Uruguay.

Most significantly, Creole dramas, the ways they impacted public life outside the theater, and the many layers of performance at Creole social clubs reveal the extent to which leisure, entertainment, or seemingly insig­ nificant or ephemeral moments in people’s lives shaped relationships to community, allowed people to feel a sense of belonging, and fomented longlasting cultural practices. Though it sounds cliché, these were transforma­ tional moments. And by studying them we glimpse dynamics of identity formation and notions of loyalty that are not visible elsewhere. These per­ formances also help us understand urban landscapes—or the concentration of social points within these—that tell stories of neighborhoods, commercial trends, and human interaction throughout some of the Riio de la Plata’s largest cities as they were experiencing unprecedented growth.

Notes 1 On the shifting demographic makeup of the region, see Arteaga et al.; Silva et al. On the rising number of Creole societies, see Vega. 2 Ecos del Progreso (Salto, Uruguay), January 3, 6, 12, 25, 1894. 3 On milongas and tangos at the plays, see Chasteen, 55–70; Julián Giménez poster, March 30, 1892, Instituto Nacional de Estudios de Teatro, Buenos Aires; see also Vega, 50–51.

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4 On this habanera variation, see El Siglo, January–February 1891. 5 La Nación (Buenos Aires), June 7, 1892. 6 El Fogón from Montevideo was the longest lived of these magazines, published from 1895 to 1914.

Bibliography Acree, William G., Jr. Staging Frontiers: The Making of Modern Popular Culture in Argentina and Uruguay. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. Adamovsky, Ezequiel. “La cuarta función del criollismo y las luchas por la definición del origen y el color del ethnos argentino (desde las primeras novelas gauchescas hasta c. 1940).” Boletín del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana “Dr. Emilio Ravignani,” 3ra serie 41 (2014): 50–92. Archetti, Eduardo P. “Masculinity, Primitivism, and Power: Gaucho, Tango, and the Shaping of Argentine National Identity.” In Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Latin America Since Independence, edited by William E. French and Katherine Elaine Bliss. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007, 212–229. Arteaga, Juan José, et al. “Inmigración y estadística en el Uruguay, 1830–1940.” In Inmigración y estadísticas en el cono sur de América, edited by Hernán Asdrúbal Silva. Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia; Washington, DC: Organización de los Estados Americanos, 1990, 261–372. 1902 Caras y Caretas (Buenos Aires). No. 196, July 5, 1902. Chasteen, John Charles. National Rhythms, African Roots: The Deep History of Latin American Popular Dance. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004. Conway, Christopher B. “Charros: A Critical Introduction.” In Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations, edited by Stuart A. Day. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017, 66–83. Darío, Rubén. “Psicologías carnavelescas.” In Páginas olvidadas. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Selectas América, 1921, 77–82. Day, Stuart A. “The Art of History.” In Introduction to Modern Mexican Culture: Critical Foundations, edited by Stuart A. Day. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2017, 3–24. Dirección General de Estadística Municipal. Anuario estadístico de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, año 3, 1893. Buenos Aires: Compañía Sud-Americana de Billetes de Banco, 1894. Dirección General de Estadística Municipal. Anuario estadístico de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, año 4, 1894. Buenos Aires: Compañía Sud-Americana de Billetes de Banco, 1895. Ecos del Progreso (Salto, Uruguay). González Velasco, Carolina. Gente de teatro: Ocio y espectáculos en la Buenos Aires de los años veinte. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2012. Klein, Teodoro. `“Los Podestá-Scotti y el género criollo.” In Martin Fierro, El Entenao, edited by Elías Regules. With notes by Teodoro Klein, Beatriz Seibel, Eneida Sansone de Martínez, and Jorge Dubatti. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Jilguero, 1996, 5–18. Lehmann-Nitsche, Robert. La leyenda de Santos Vega: Documentos para la sociología argentina. In Anales de la Facultad de Derecho y Ciencias Sociales, vol. 2. Buenos Aires: n.p., 1916.

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Llanes, Ricardo M. Teatros de Buenos Aires: Referencias históricas. Buenos Aires: Secretaria de Cultura y Acción Social, 1968. Marial, José. “Los enemigos de Juan Moreira.” Revista del Instituto Nacional de Estudios de Teatro 5, no. 13 (1986): 60–65. Mazziotti, Nora. “El auge de las revistas teatrales en 1910–1934.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos no. 425 (1985): 73–88. Mazziotti, Nora. “Bambalinas: El auge de una modalidad teatral-periodística.” In Mundo urbano y cultural popular: Estudios de historia social argentina, edited by Diego Armus. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1990, 69–89. La Nación (Buenos Aires). Oliven, Ruben. Tradition Matters: Modern Gaúcho Identity in Brazil. Translated by Carmen Chaves Tesser. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. El Paysandú (Paysandú, Uruguay). Podestá, José J. Medio siglo de farándula: Memorias de José J. Podestá. Edited and with a preliminary study by Osvaldo Pellettieri. Buenos Aires: Galerna, 2003. Prieto, Adolfo. El discurso criollista en la formación de la Argentina moderna. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores, 2006. Regules, Elías. Martin Fierro, El Entenao. With notes by Teodoro Klein, Beatriz Seibel, Eneida Sansone de Martínez, and Jorge Dubatti. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Jilguero, 1996. Regules, Elías. Los guachitos: Comedia criolla. Montevideo: Peña Hnos., 1927. Regules, Elías. Versos criollos. With a prologue by Lauro Ayestarán. Colección Clásicos Uruguayos, vol. 57. Montevideo: Ministerio de Instrucción Pública y Previsión Social, 1964. Sábato, Hilda. “On Political Citizenship in Nineteenth-Century Latin America.” American Historical Review 106, no. 4 (2001): 1290–1315. Sánchez, Florencio. “Cartas de un flojo”; “El caudillaje criminal en Sud América”; “El teatro nacional.” Montevideo: n.p., 1962. Seigel, Micol. “Cocoliche’s Romp: Fun with Nationalism at Argentina’s Carnival.” TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 2 (2000): 56–83. Silva, Hernán Asdrúbal, et al. “Estadísticas sobre la inmigración a la Argentina.” In Inmigración y estadísticas en el cono sur de América, edited by Hernán Asdrúbal Silva. Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia; Washington, DC: Organización de los Estados Americanos, 1990, 13–68. El Siglo (Montevideo). Vega, Carlos. Apuntes para la historia del movimiento tradicionalista argentino. Buenos Aires: Secretaria de Cultura de la Presidencia de la Nación, Instituto Nacional de Musicología“Carlos Vega,” 1981. Viladrich, Anahí. More Than Two to Tango: Argentine Tango Immigrants in New York City. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2013.

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BASTA: reactivating bodies and the dramaturgy of femicides in Argentina Paola Hernández University of Wisconsin–Madison

During the military dictatorship that took place from 1976 to 1983, Argentina became a public stage from which to denounce human rights abuses. In the 1970s, the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) were the first all-female group to emerge as political actors by uti­ lizing their bodies, voices, and photographs of their disappeared children to confront the government’s atrocities through their rounds around Plaza de Mayo square in Buenos Aires. Decades later, in 2015, another all-female ensemble, Ni Una Menos, or NUM (Not One Woman Less), began to take over social media, public squares, and the streets to once again denounce abuses. Propelled by the terrifying statistics in Argentina that count one woman murdered every twenty-nine hours by a partner or someone close to her circle, NUM consisted of journalists, writers, artists, and activists seeking to bring attention to gender violence in Argentina and demand a stop to its normalization.1 Unlike the Madres, NUM’s use of social media and particularly hashtags to mobilize people is at the core of how they be­ came an important political voice. Their indignation over the systematic abuse and murders of women led to a mobilization that connected to other feminist movements and other artists and became an international phe­ nomenon. I am particularly interested in exploring the performance links of this feminist movement, especially its interconnectedness and the networks for other artists and activists it creates. My aim in this chapter is to focus on an Argentine artist group called Expresión MoLE, which has performed alongside NUM in women’s strikes and in marches since 2018. I focus on the way Expresión MoLE, a small local group, leverages their background as aerial acrobats and trained dancers to further an embodied dramaturgy of femicide within feminist protests. My goal is twofold: to elaborate on the productivity of the collaborative nature of the feminist movement in Argentina that brings new work into the orbit of NUM; and to explore how Expresión MoLE’s visual strategies function as a kind of dramaturgical exposition of femicide, one that challenges spectators to get an un­ comfortable, close-up look at the implications of seeing the victims of these killings as trash. DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-3

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Like many other local Argentine artists and activists who have used women’s marches to stake their ground,2 Expresión MoLE calls our at­ tention to acrobatic practices that focus on the mistreatment of female bodies, generating gruesome, shocking, and even morbid, yet carefully cu­ rated, aesthetic images of the violence perpetrated by the patriarchal system.3 Their performance BASTA (STOP) situates female bodies inside clear trash bags, which are either hung on walls or “discarded.” These de­ pictions of disposable women are left in front of governmental buildings, such as the Congress, or on the walls of commercial banks.4 Expresión MoLE intervenes in the streets by recodifying the members’ own bodies into a theatrical staging of the silence behind the femicides. They define their work as artistic actions, where aesthetics and activism unite. This resonates with what has been termed artivism, a neologism that fuses art and activism to highlight both the aesthetics of how artists work and the action they take toward social justice and change. As other scholars have argued, artists create images and affective modes of relation through symbolic performance that build counterhegemonic power.5 Their name, Expresión MoLE, clearly indicates their goals: to make an impact through movement. MoLE is a neologism that comes from the fusion of the words movimiento (movement), libertad (freedom), and expresión (expression). Mol (without the e) is also a measure of size that expands on the group’s mission of taking over nonconventional spaces and appro­ priating them through their ropes and movement. In Spanish, the word expresión can also signify how a body expresses itself through art. For in­ stance, “expresión corporal” is a commonly known phrase to emphasize nonverbal communication by focusing on what the body can express, usually free movement. Interestingly, BASTA confines the performers’ movements into bags, stopping their freedom to move and thus making a strong statement about their own captivity as artists who become witnesses of femicides. I should note that their name also emphasizes the artivism embedded in their work: artistic expression and mole tactics of intervention and disturbance, as seen in small logos they use in different performances that, if one is not paying attention, go unnoticed.

Femicides and the enactment of change In December 2012, Argentina approved a new law to include any crime referring to the murder of women under the category of “aggravated ho­ micide” for gender-related reasons. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, by 2015, sixteen Latin American countries had special legislation defining and in­ cluding femicide, feminicide, and aggravated homicide under the law.6 Changes to the law in these countries expose the fragile situation that women endure in everyday life. Out of twenty-five countries worldwide with the highest rates of femicides, fourteen are in Latin America and the

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Caribbean. And even though laws have been amended to add “femicide” or “feminicide” as punishable acts under the law, there are still many incidents where homicides of women go unaccounted for, are not reported or are not considered femicides. In the 1970s, when Diana Russell coined the term femicide,7 she defined it as “the killing of females by males because they are female” as a way to emphasize that these killings should be recognized by society, language, and the law.8 Later, Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, Rosa-Linda Fregoso, and Cynthia Bejarano expanded the concept of femicide by renaming it femini­ cide “to mark our discursive and material contributions and perspectives as transborder feminist thinkers from the global South (the Américas) in its redefinition.”9 As they state, their choice of feminicide over femicide is both political and theoretical; it foregrounds Latin America as a possible theo­ retical center that produces knowledge and, thus, decolonizes the idea that Latin America can be seen only as a field of study.10 Today both terms are used interchangeably, even in the law. The Declaration on Femicide adopted in 2008 by the Organization of American States (OAS), headed by the Follow-up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention (MESECVI), together with the Committee of Experts on Violence (CEVI), clearly states: In Latin America and the Caribbean femicide is the most serious manifestation of discrimination and violence against women. … That it is the violent death of women based on gender, whether it occurs within the family, a domestic partnership, or any other interpersonal relation­ ship; in the community, by any person, or when it is perpetrated or tolerated by the state or its agents; that numerous cases of femicide occur as a result of unequal power relations within acouple; that most femicides go unpunished.11 As a response to social, cultural, and political inaction, Ni Una Menos emphasizes how activist movements gain power through social media by making their platform an open call for other artists and activists to parti­ cipate in and promote social change. NUM began as a cultural event mo­ tivated by indignation—a reading marathon that invited authors and artists to come together via Facebook to read against gender violence. From there, NUM quickly evolved into a feminist movement, reclaiming a physical space on the streets with colorful banners, glitter on faces, chants, signs, and performances. The name, Ni Una Menos, is reminiscent of a poem by the now murdered Mexican activist Susana Chávez, who published against fe­ micides. She wrote, “Not one more dead, not one woman less.”12 Marcela A. Fuentes has cogently studied and analyzed the beginnings of NUM and how their “hashtag performativity” underscores an important and new way of understanding this movement as a social and physically situated activist movement. She states that “through the persistent ephemerality of social

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media and collective performance practices, NUM denounces, interrupts, and challenges social scripts of women’s dispensability and violent dis­ ciplining.”13 In the era of social media, the #NiUnaMenos hashtag allows for other groups of women allies and artists alike to align to the cause, and in their so doing, NUM’s network grows exponentially. This, in turn, en­ courages other national and international movements to align to NUM. As I write this chapter during the COVID-19 pandemic, however, I constantly ask myself what happens to women and to all those who protest against violence, in dangerous conditions under strict confinement and in social distancing? The Declaration of Femicide contains a clause that states, “The situation of impunity for femicides is exacerbated by situations of emergency, armed conflict, natural disasters, and other hazardous situa­ tions.”14 So what happens to women in violent domestic households during these times? How is the lack of a working justice system aggravating their situation to the point that they are being killed and their murders are going unnoticed? As of May 2020, within only two months since the beginning of mandatory confinement and social distancing due to the pandemic in Argentina, seventy-seven female bodies have been found murdered and their deaths classified as femicides.15 To help women in distress during this time, Secretary of Women, Gender and Diversity Alejandra Arce created the “red mask” campaign. With the collaboration of pharmacies and the LGBTQI+ collective, a woman can seek help from any pharmacy by asking for a red mask, a code that she is in a dangerous and vulnerable state. Since the majority of femicides happen at the hands of partners or ex-partners who are sharing the same space during confinement, the pharmacist can call a number dedicated to these situations and summon help.16 The work that NUM has done since their first march in June 2015 under­ scores how their protests, symbols, hashtags, and performances laid the foun­ dation for other organizations to step in and participate. This network fits within what Fuentes has aptly described as “performance constellations,” the pro­ ductive exchange between physical and digital sites that “redefine traditional repertoires of protest and activism in ways that are key to responding to con­ temporary systems of exploitation and subjection.”17 NUM’s use of both phy­ sical protests and digital sites made the topic of femicides a more widely known fact, attracted other activists and artists to join the cause, and enabled them to build an important activist constellation. As member Cecilia Palmeiro states, by 2017, two years after the inception of NUM, they could already see a turn in the public’s understanding of the word femicide. She explains that their work helped people visualize femicide, to the point that TV talk shows began using words such as “patriarchy,” “masculine domination,” and “femicide.” Representations of femicides are now part of the culture represented in telenovelas and films.18 And the red mask campaign is another example of how much mainstream visibility the topic of femicides has gained.19 NUM’s slogans carry an interconnected and historical past that references the numerous abuses against women committed over the years. Palmeiro

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contends that what has made NUM such a central feminist movement is their “scream” and the interconnectedness of historical events that carry a heavy weight. For instance, she highlights that the articulation between the body and politics is mediated by language. As a feminist movement with international networks, NUM has created slogans that resonate with those of other human rights fights. NUM’s phrase “Vivas nos queremos” (We Want Ourselves Alive) comes from the Mexican slogan “Vivos se los lle­ varon” (They Took Them Alive), a clear reference to Mexico’s dirty war, especially post-1968, which was later recycled by protestors who sought justice for the forty-three students who disappeared in Ayotzinapa, Mexico, in 2014. It is also influenced by the Madres de Plaza de Mayo’s slogan “Aparición con vida” (We Want Them Alive), which they used during their plight against the military regime and still use every Thursday afternoon around the Plaza de Mayo.20 International connections among different human rights groups that fight for women’s rights also share tactics and slogans. Similar to the Madres of the disappeared in Argentina, the activist mothers in Mexico, Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home) and Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters), demand the reappearance of their disappeared daughters in Ciudad Juárez and other cities by utilizing the slogan “We Want Them Alive.” As Fregoso states, “‘We Want Them Alive’ speaks the language of the ephemeral to mobilize the socially ghostly, to animate the unseen but felt presences, the memories of las desaparecidas.”21 In Argentina, where the last dictatorship used violence, rape, and dehu­ manization of female bodies to foster a state of fear, the culture of that era still prevails. The normalization of the brutality exercised against female bodies by state terrorism involved different methods and misogynist prac­ tices that linked “political repression and patriarchal culture as mutually constituting forces.”22 This interdependent relationship between macho power and violence through the use of militarized forces and the existence of the misogynist military state, together with their hypermasculine visuals and attitudes, not to mention the phallic expressions of their long-barrel rifles, “have helped fuel contemporary expressions of feminicide.”23 This is why NUM’s slogan “Vivas nos queremos” reverberates with recent and inter­ connected pasts.

Expresión MoLE Joining forces with NUM, both in engaging digital media and in having a physical presence at public rallies, Expresión MoLE has made their own local impact on the antifemicide movement in Argentina. Their quiet, eerie performance BASTA (2018) has occupied many public spaces, surprising spectators who walk by. Some bystanders reject the gruesome sight; others pause to watch briefly, while many stop to take in the performance. The initial performance of Basta took place at the first national women’s march

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and strike in December 2018. This march brought together different feminist groups and associations, led by NUM, to denounce the acquittal of two men who, in 2016, were charged for the rape and murder of sixteen-year-old Lucía Pérez, yet another injustice committed against a young woman. The aftermath of Lucía’s femicide unveiled the patriarchal judicial system. The march was also an effort to explore ways to make femicides a visible act, resisting official rhetoric and actions that continue to make them invisible and unpunishable under the law.24 The hypervisibility of femicides is a way to challenge the impunity and the cloak of invisibility that perpetrators seem to have enjoyed for years. Expresión MoLE confronts the audience, all of us, with a raw understanding of how a female body is seen, treated, killed, and misjudged. Their work, while some may question as too raw, too visual, and too violent, unveils what is left behind the scenes of these atrocious acts. In other words, BASTA positions the spectator as witness to an act we usually only hear about in the news. For those willing to engage, the performance creates a durational space within which to stop and watch a direct image of what the protest is about: the impunity over femicides. Trained in aerial acrobatics and dance, this group is politically committed to making femicides more visible. Making death visible aligns with what Achille Mbembe calls “ne­ cropolitics,” a term that allows him to explore the right to expose other people to death, expanding on the notion that biopolitics is not enough to enable us to understand life and death. He states that “to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To ex­ ercise sovereignty is to exercise control over morality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power.”25 While “politics is therefore death that lives a human life,” he questions the place that is “given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body).”26 With its members devoted to social causes and actions, Expresión MoLE’s interest has been in making art, especially through acrobatics, a tool to give voice to the voiceless. In the past, the group has worked with vulnerable teenagers and has been present at the commemorations of Argentina’s Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice, an official holiday that honors the memory of those disappeared during the last dictatorship. When the judicial system in Argentina failed to condemn Lucía’s perpe­ trators, it became evident, yet again, that the widespread impunity for atrocities committed against women results from the confluence and com­ plicity of the state, the law, and the police. Expresión MoLE’s BASTA performance was a reaction not only to the acquittal but to ongoing judicial impunities. As member Yuriko Arakaki explains, this performance was “born from the need to send a clear, raw, and direct message because in the real world we are being killed and thrown out as trash. The State is responsible, and their answers are not nearly enough. The judicial system is still patriarchal, and we also see how the media portrays femicides from a patriarchal point of view.”27 Since their first

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intervention, with only five participants, BASTA has attracted fifty women from different walks of life to take part in subsequent performances: the women’s march on International Women’s Day (known colloquially as 8M) in 2019 and, as a precursor to the 2020 8M event, an intervention on March 6, 2020.28 Arakaki explains that the lack of time to organize led to a small group of participants the first time; yet the growth in numbers with every iteration has had a strong impact. Clearly BASTA is a decisive work that will continue. BASTA, while simple, contains an intricate expression within it. All the participants in the first performance relied on acrobatics to mount their bodies from large windows and long iron bars via harnesses and ropes, naked, leaving the distinctive green handkerchief around their wrists that supports free and legal abortion rights. Then, they covered themselves in plastic and mounted their equipment. Their motionless bodies were there to be seen, to be analyzed, and almost to be touched. As their artistic inter­ vention took place, the group—without a permit—took over a building that currently belongs to the international bank ICBC. Bodies that are usually found on the ground now dressed the bank building, changing the audi­ ence’s perspective. Positioning bodies on a wall, a place usually reserved for hanging art or other visual objects, reconfigures how we see them. The building was strategically chosen on a corner of two major intersections in downtown Buenos Aires, where Florida Street—a pedestrian-only street usually packed with tourists, bankers, and other office workers—intersects with Diagonal Norte, a highly transited avenue. For Arakaki, this space was important to also attract “people who do not belong to the artistic venue and who tend to be indifferent to these events and who do not participate in the marches.”29 Their urban intervention disturbed the city while their bodies appro­ priated a commercial building that due to their large windows suited their acrobatic needs. They quietly draped the building with their bodies for the two hours the performance lasted, remaining there in stillness or barely moving. The performance was augmented by signs on the walls that read: “BASTA DE IMPUNIDAD” (STOP IMPUNITY), “NOS ESTAN MATANDO” (THEY ARE KILLING US), “NO SOMOS EL BANQU­ ETE DE TU ABUSO (WE ARE NOT THE BANQUET OF YOUR ABUSE), “MI CUERPO ES MIO” (MY BODY IS MINE), “LAS REL­ ACIONES DE PODER SON LA BASE DE LA VIOLENCIA” (POWER RELATIONS ARE THE BASIS OF VIOLENCE), “NO SOMOS OBJETOS DE TUS ANSIAS DE PODER” (WE ARE NOT OBJECTS OF YOUR DESIRE FOR POWER), “NUESTRAS VIDAS NO SON DESCARTABLES” (OUR LIVES ARE NOT DISPOSABLE), “NI UNA MENOS,” and others. BASTA made an impact. The media had not been notified about this performance; however, they quickly showed up and began taking pictures, wanting to learn more about the group. The artists, for their part, made a

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Figure 3.1 Performance of BASTA outside ICBC, Florida Street and Diagonal Norte, Buenos Aires, December 2018. Image courtesy of Expresión MoLE.

clear stand on gender-related deaths that go unpunished, amplifying the visibility of these crimes and attempting to transform how society sees the impunity with which they are carried out (Figure 3.1). Similar to how Judith Butler questions whose lives count as lives or “what makes a grievable life,” Expresión MoLE works directly with the idea of the female body as disposable, as trash.30 How do we grieve these bodies, and how do we mourn them? For Arakaki, their performance tackled the image of trash to contest to how the patriarchy has treated female bodies: “we do not accept this violent message and this is why we put our bodies on the line [poner el cuerpo] to the point of physically feeling the pain.”31 When asked about their own personal safety in such a vulnerable position, Arakaki ex­ plains that they always perform with a lawyer by their side and others who can protect them if the need arises.32 After the first performance with five women, they made a public call for new participants via social media, and forty women joined the group for the women’s march 8M in 2019. With so many more bodies, the group decided to use only one large sign instead of the many that characterized their first performance. This sign read: “CADA VEZ SOMOS MAS” (WE ARE MORE EACH TIME), not only a clear testament to their own growth but also a strong statement about femicides. This time, some of the bodies in the performance had tags hanging from their toes, with names and dates, similar

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Figure 3.2 Performance of BASTA during the women’s march 8M, ICBC, Buenos Aires, March 8, 2019. Photograph by Stella Maris Giordano.

to those seen in morgues. The use of these tags also signaled a more intimate relationship between the bodies and the spectator, calling the latter to get closer and read the names of some of the recent femicides. In other words, women move from statistic to personhood to being named as marker of a subject (Figure 3.2). The third time, the group decided not to perform as part of the women’s march but as a kind of precursor to it, in large part because they wanted to take BASTA to the “regular streets, and regular people,” as Arakaki states. Setting their still young bodies inside clear plastic bags, they performed in front of the National Congress. No hanging bags this time around, only a pile of naked, lifeless female bodies in bags that climbed around the stairs of the building (Figure 3.3). According to Arakaki, this performance was very different for them be­ cause they were not cocooned and protected within the march. The audience was distinct; onlookers did not disturb or protest the performance. Rather, some people went by, indifferent to what they were seeing.33 As the BASTA performances evolved, so did the artists and how they understood their own interpretation of whose bodies should be represented. Thus, in the third intervention, Expresión MoLE’s open call included trans people and tra­ vestis to join them in the performance, bringing attention not just to femi­ cides but also to other forms of gender-based violence and killings.34 As numbers indicate, hate crimes against the LGBTQI+ community continue to increase, and yet trans bodies are often not taken into consideration in statistics about and conversations on femicide35 (Figure 3.4).

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Figure 3.3 Performance of BASTA, National Congress, Buenos Aires, March 6, 2020. Photograph by Charly Díaz Azcue.

Dramaturgy of femicides Utilizing the visual component and performative gesture to foreground the unspeakable, the silence that remains around these bodies, BASTA is an example of what I am calling a “dramaturgy of femicides.” I am taking inspiration from Hotel Juárez: Dramaturgia de feminicidios, edited by Enrique Mijares in 2008. Even though much has changed since 2008 and my focus is not on the US-Mexican border town of Ciudad Juárez, the concept is particularly useful. I see the term “dramaturgy of femicides” as a com­ pelling idea via which to understand how performances, through their theatrical implications (setting, props, actors, audience), can help us relate to the impact of images in artistic manifestations. Similar to how Baz Kershaw has analyzed protests via the lens of performance, stating that they “may reveal dimensions to the action that are relatively opaque to other ap­ proaches,” I, too, explore how we can see and understand the impact of the theatrical in feminist protests.36 While dramaturgy of femicide can also underscore how the media and the perpetrator both rely on the visual to create a femicide scenario, exposing women’s bodies in a negative way, I see how artists appropriate this dra­ maturgy to make a clear point about femicides.37 For core NUM member María Moreno, visualizing women as trash stuffed inside bags feeds into the media frenzy of gory murders and sensationalistic journalism. In the reading

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Figure 3.4 Public call for BASTA, March 2020, Buenos Aires. Image courtesy of Expresión MoLE.

marathon that prompted the beginning of NUM through social media, she made a call for women “to get out of the bag” and to change the narrative instigated by the media, what Fuentes attributes to giving “texture and depth to bodies.”38 This call to “restore women” to give them a voice, a

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body, was the foundational first step that later gave way to the movement to “disrupt the femicidial seriality.”39 The need to be humanized as a citizen whose body and voice matter was the igniting force behind what NUM has become. As activists, this call promoted a change, a way to regain a voice and take control of the narrative installed, in large part, by the media. From an artistic point of view, however, I see that dramaturgy of femi­ cide, with its theatrical underpinnings of stage, objects, actors, and audience, calls attention to the silence behind the female seriality and thus makes a case for using the visible, the raw, and the visceral as a way to protest the reality that is hidden or unknown to many. By allowing the theatrical into the activist movement, artists also manipulate and appropriate the narrative instilled by others and rework it through performance. In making the street their stage, artists provide a new perspective on these bodies, hopefully making the spectator aware of the implications of the seriality of the killings. The repositioning of the powerful images as the primary language in the discussion of femicides creates a new image-text relationship and emphasizes the theatrical event as a “site of conflict, a nexus where political, institu­ tional, and social antagonism play themselves out in the materiality of representation.”40 In other words, to understand the strength in the dra­ maturgy of femicides is also to value the recodification of space and politics within and through the bodies. Theatrical performances such as BASTA, then, transform the street as stage into a space where social and political statements confront femicides as seriality. By affirming how women are seen and treated as trash, the powerful exposure to replicated bodies inside plastic bags denotes the propagation and recycling involved in the femicides. In a similar fashion, Mexican scholar Sergio González Rodríguez de­ scribes femicides as a consequence of how the US militarization of the Mexican border, combined with the drug wars and cartels, created what he calls a “femicide machine.” With special attention to Ciudad Juárez, he defines this term as “an apparatus that didn’t just create the conditions for the murders of dozens of women and little girls, but developed the institu­ tions that guaranteed impunity for those crimes and even legalized them.”41 The connections between the “seriality” and the “machinery” behind femi­ cides suggest a methodic and strategic act that is designed and structured by other outside forces, such as the state, with its constant impunity, or the ongoing powerful drug lords and their networks. Even in the context of Argentina, this form of violence propagated by repetition asserts femicides as a condition that refuses to be dismantled. In her studies on the impact of globalization and neoliberal markets, Saskia Sassen argues how citizens should live and proclaim rights to the globalized cities and markets. She explains that in a global city, “new citi­ zenship practices have to do with the production of ’presence’ of those without power and politics that claims rights to the city.”42 As cities change,

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so do the structures of power that open up conditions for new political actors to claim their voice through a “distinctive presence.” This presence, thus, “signals the possibility of a politics.”43 In the digital networks that NUM so ingeniously created and made viral, as well as in the physically situated performances embedded in the feminist marches, the “production of presence” seems an adequate term to understand the intricacies of how new political movements and social changes take shape. I would argue also that artistic actions and interventions take the concept of “production of pre­ sence” as their core understanding of how bodies can affect and relate to one another in political ways. The dramaturgical exposition of femicides, then, exposes a new site of citizenship that urges spectators to bring the women out of the bags.

Bodies as trash In her writings about femicides in Mexico, feminist scholar Rita Segato sees that women are the “waste product of the process, a discardable piece” that men use as a way to visualize their power that symbolizes their own net­ works and structures.44 The image of corpses as trash conjures the in­ numerable brutal ways women are murdered, positing a visual remembrance of how they are desecrated, raped, killed, and tossed aside. Well-known Argentine journalist and writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara explores the same concept in an essay titled “Basura” (Trash). In a poetic yet piercing fashion, she states: Tiradas a la basura, desgarradas, en pelotas: en la montaña asquerosa, un cuerpo como una cosa, como una cosa ya rota y que no sirve para nada, los restos del predador, la carne que le sobró de su festín asesino. Horas antes o después a la chica la buscaron la familia, los amigos, al final la policía y casi siempre la encuentra el que hace de la basura su trabajo cotidiano: un cartonero, el chofer de un camión recolector, alguien que anda por ahí. … Tiradas a la basura en la bolsa de consorcio: igual que se tira un forro, la cáscara del zapallo, los papeles que no sirven y los huesos del asado entre tantas otras cosas. Tiradas como si nada, como objetos de consumo que ya fueron consumidos. Agarrarlas, asustarlas, verlas rogar, desnudarlas, humillarlas, violarlas, después matarlas, meterlas en una bolsa, tirarlas a la montaña de restos de la ciudad. Ya terminó el predador. Seguirán la policía, los abogados, los jueces y las cámaras de TV: sigue la carnicería en una especie de show que explica los femicidios. Thrown out in the trash, torn, naked: in the disgusting pile, a body like a thing, a broken thing that no longer has a purpose, the remains of the perpetrator, the remaining meat left behind from his killing celebration. Hours before or after, family, friends, and finally the police search for

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the girl, but she is usually found by those whose lives are around the piles of trash: a cartonero,45 a driver of a trash collection truck, someone who is just there. … Thrown out in commercial trash bags: the same as a when a condom is discarded, a pumpkin peel, papers that are no longer useful, the bones from the barbecue among many other things. Thrown out as nothing, as objects of consumption that have been consumed already. Take them, scare them, see them plea, undress them, humiliate them, rape them, and later kill them, put them inside a bag and throw them in the pile with the city’s garbage dump. The predator is done. Then the police arrive, the lawyers, the judges, and the TV cameras: the carnage continues in a kind of show that describes the femicides.46 In this intense and acute essay, Cabezón Cámara’s words bear strong behind-the-scenes witness accounts to how these brutal acts are committed. Alternating her poetic voice between a narration of the facts and fragments of how others react to these killings, her words help build a distorted sense of the events. Yet there is also a sense of impunity, of repetition, and of indifference; only when the TV cameras seem to enjoy some images that will sell does the story of the young woman behind the plastic bag become im­ portant, even if only for the short moment the news cycle lasts. The objectivization of female bodies is compounded by society’s norms of how a “good woman” should behave. As if seeing a naked female body inside a plastic bag is not enough to make us understand the sadistic behavior behind femicide, people question whether the dead women’s dresses were too short, whether they had too many drinks that night, and, ultimately, whether they were perhaps the ones actually at fault. These objectivizing questions clearly suggest that the women are guilty of questionable behavior and should be held accountable for their choices. In Cabezón Cámara’s words: Si la chica usaba short. Si tenía más de un novio. Si puso fotos en Facebook con boquita pecadora. Si salía mucho de noche. Si volvía a la mañana y tenía olor a whisky. Si estudiaba o no estudiaba. … Si fumaba marihuana o sólo tomaba agua. Si tenía buenas notas o había repetido de año. If the girl wore shorts. If she had more than one boyfriend. If she put pictures of a sinful mouth on Facebook. If she went out a lot at night. If she returned in the morning smelling of whisky. If she studied or did not study. … If she smoked pot or only drank water. If she had good grades or if she had to redo the academic year.47 As the construct of the female behind the body is imagined, the patriarchal system judges whether or not she called for her own demise, whether or not she is somehow guilty of her own death.

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As Segato has stated, rape is an act of power, an act of domination, and a political act.48 Her own writings about this topic inspired the young feminist collective from Valparaíso, Chile, LasTesis, to action. Repudiating these repulsive questions about women’s behavior, they created a song, “Un violador en tu camino” (A Rapist in Your Path, 2019), and a performance that quickly went viral and was performed by women across the globe.49 Their work is predated by the work of Expresión MoLE and Cabezón Cámara’s poetic rendition of femicides. I mention LasTesis briefly because their artistic intervention is a highly codified performance that confronts the state and the police by calling them rapists. Their straightforward lyrics and symbolic use of the blindfold in performance expose the patriarchal legal system as guilty of constant impunity and of turning a blind eye toward femicides and other gender-related violence. LasTesis and subsequent female voices clearly declare that being either killed or raped is not the woman’s fault, nor is what the victims wore or where they were; “the rapist is you,” they sing, referring to police, judges, the state, and the president. Like the aforementioned examples, BASTA, though it has been per­ formed only three times in different local marches, cleverly stalls any pos­ sible assumption of “What type of girl was this?” Instead, the work confronts the street audience with what is left behind. The quiet perfor­ mance, with only the hanging bodies and the signs on the walls, creates the necessary silence and inspires the respect we owe to these women. The in­ terconnection between the public space, the noisy streets, and the quiet hanging bags dislocates the regular life of the city; instead, Expresión MoLE recodify the street as the setting for a highly visible performance of mourning that awakens our senses and urges social change. I concur with Cecilia Vázquez that the streets become a special, relevant political space that attracts physically situated artistic events to create an aesthetic and political language that energizes social mobilization and recognition.50 I would even go further and state that a visceral performance such as BASTA compiles a set of affects, emotions, and relations that clearly expose the violent and demonic side of human behavior. The theatrical exposition of these bodies makes the busy audience pause, see, and hopefully be moved to join in the forces of social change (Figure 3.5). Five years since the first time NUM took to the streets, the COVID-19 pandemic and the stay-at-home orders have reshuffled our understanding of physically situated protests. As with Argentina’s red mask campaign, which established new protocols to help those in violent domestic situations, so too do artistic collectives find creative solutions to performing or protesting from home by relying on social media platforms as their activist space. In this time of uncertainty, Expresión MoLE has cleverly transformed their own slogan “BASTA NI UNA MENOS” to “We Say #BASTA” and urged that people use it from home. They ask for anyone to trace their open hand,

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Figure 3.5 Digital pamphlet during COVID times, June 2020. Image courtesy of Expresión MoLE.

signaling a stop, on paper and to cut it out and place it on their windows or doors, as well as to upload these hand images to social media with the hashtag #BASTA. Presence in virtual space expands the collective possibi­ lities of interconnected networks that have made the feminist movement more vital now than ever.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Griselda López for introducing me to feminist artists and activists in Argentina and to Marcela Fuentes for her invaluable feed­ back in a draft version of this chapter.

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Notes 1 Numbers are according to Observatorio Nacional MuMalá, Registro nacional de femicidios, femicidios vinculados, trans/travesticidios y lesbicidios de MuMalá, año 2020, parcial y resumen en contexto pandemia COVID 19. A full report on recent femicides and transfemicides can be found here: http://libresdelsur.org.ar/wpcontent/uploads/Registro-Nacional-de-Femicidios-2020.pdf. 2 See also the collective Periodistas Argentinas, who protested in favor of abortion rights donning Handmaid’s Tale outfits; Las Mariposas AUGe (Gender Urban Action), whose work centering around dance demands laws against human trafficking; and Murga Baila la Chola, a carnivalesque dance group. 3 Expresión MoLE was founded in 2018 by a young group of artists with similar backgrounds in dance, aerial acrobatics, and theater. Current members are Alina Lacoste, Victoria Varela, Leandro Rubio Gutiérrez, Maximiliano Médica, and Yuriko Arakaki. 4 Melissa Wright’s Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism is a notable work that focuses on how the literal spaces and workplace environments of global capitalism transform the female body into a worthless being. Here I am looking at the act of embodying and reinvigorating the women left for dead, treated no better than trash. 5 See Marcela A. Fuentes, Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019); Diana Taylor, Performance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). 6 It is interesting to note that the majority of the sixteen countries (Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, and the Dominican Republic) explicitly mention “femicide” or “feminicide” as the penal type. While in Argentina, the Argentine Penal Code 26.791 uses the term “aggravated homicide,” the meaning is clear in the amendments to Article 80, which state that life in prison could be imposed on those who kill “a woman when the act was perpetrated by a man with gender violence.” The amendment also adds a clause that the man could be charged when he intended to cause harm and suffering to a domestic partner. See https://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/41015/7/S1801211_en.pdf. 7 See Jill Radford and Diana E. H. Russell, eds., Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992). 8 Diana E. H. Russell and Roberta A. Harmes, eds., Femicide in Global Perspective (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 3–4. 9 Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano, “A Cartography of Feminicide in the Americas,” introduction to Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas, ed. Fregoso and Bejarano (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. See also Marcela Lagarde y de los Ríos, “Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide,” preface to Terrorizing Women, xi–xxv. 10 Ibid., 4. 11 Organization of American States Inter-American Commission of Women, Declaration on Femicide, August 15, 2008, 6–7. 12 Carlos Acebal, “Ni Una Menos: Del grito colectivo a la marea global,” Redacción Archivos del Presente: Revista de Política Internacional, November 27, 2017, http://archivosdelpresente.com/articulos/ni-una-menos/. 13 Marcela A. Fuentes, “#NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess): Hashtag Performativity, Memory, and Direct Action Against Gender Violence in Argentina,” in Women Mobilizing Memory, ed. Ayse Gül Altinay et al (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 174.

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14 Organization of American States Inter-American Commission of Women, 7. 15 “Dos nuevos asesinatos conmueven a Santa Fe y Tucumán,” Página 12, May 21, 2020, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/267401-ya-son-42-los-femicidios-cometidosdurante-la-pandemia-de-co. 16 For more information on the campaign “barbijo rojo,” see Mariana Carbajal, “Coronavirus: Campaña contra la violencia machista en cuarentena,” Pagina 12, April 8, 2020, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/258130-coronavirus-campanacontra-la-violencia-machista-en-cuarente. 17 Fuentes, Performance Constellations, 2. 18 Acebal, “Ni Una Menos.” 19 As of this writing, it was too soon to tell the outcome of this campaign; however, some critics have already stated that its publicity might also alert the victimizer, rendering the campaign potentially obsolete. 20 Acebal, “Ni Una Menos.” 21 Rosa-Linda Fregoso, “‘We Want Them Alive!’: The Politics and Culture of Human Rights,” Social Identities 12, no. 2 (March 2006): 127. Italics in the original. 22 Fregoso and Bejarano, “A Cartography of Feminicide,” 13. 23 Ibid., 14. 24 The first strike in 2016 later evolves into a transnational movement that would become the first international women’s strike on March 8 (8M), 2017. NUM’s slogan “#Nosotras Paramos” (We Strike) takes aim at foregrounding women’s presence in the workplace. 25 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–12. 26 Ibid., 14–15; 12. 27 Personal interview with Yuriko Arakaki, May 8, 2020. 28 The three female members of Expresión MoLE participated and invited two other females to take part in the performance. The two male members of the group worked on the concept and design of BASTA as well as promoting safety during all performances. 29 Verónica Abdala, “Una acción del grupo ‘Expresión Mole,’” Clarín, December 6, 2018, https://www.clarin.com/cultura/mujeres-colgantes-bolsas-plasticas-artistashicieron-impactante-performance-marcha-lucia-perez_0_3SMgEAkt-.html. 30 Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London and New York: Verso Books, 2004), 20. Italics in the original. 31 The artist explains that after two hours, their bodies began to stiffen and hurt. For them, this was a very personal relationship between their work and their own physical pain. 32 Personal interview with Arakaki. 33 Personal interview with Arakaki. 34 According to Arakaki, only women responded to the call and participated in the performance, but they remain committed to inclusivity. 35 For more information on murder rates, see Observatorio Nacional de Crímenes de Odio LGBT, http://agenciapresentes.org. There is also another march dedi­ cated to trans bodies, National March against Transvesticides, which demands an end to femicides against trans female bodies. For more information, see Alma Fernández, “‘Basta de Travesticidios’ es un grito contra todas las violencias,” Agencias Presentes, October 13, 2019, https://agenciapresentes.org/2019/10/13/ basta-de-travesticidios-y-transfemicidios-es-un-grito-contra-todas-la-violencias/. 36 Baz Kershaw. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard (London and New York; Routledge, 1999), 97. 37 Fuentes, “#NiUnaMenos,” 176.

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38 Ibid., 179. 39 Ibid. 40 W. J. T Mitchell. Picture Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1994), 91. 41 Sergio González Rodríguez, The Femicide Machine, trans. Michael ParkerStainback, Semiotext(e)/Intervention Series 11 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 7. 42 Saskia Sassen, “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics,” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 47 (2002): 19–20. 43 Ibid., 23. 44 Rita Laura Segato, “Territory, Sovereignity, and Crimes of the Second State: The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women,” in Terrorizing Women, ed. Fregoso and Bejarano, 77. 45 Cartonero is a word used to describe people who gather and sell cardboard and other recyclables. 46 Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, “Basura,” Revista Anfibia, March 19, 2015, http:// revistaanfibia.com/ensayo/basura/. 47 Ibid. 48 “Rita Segato: Antropóloga que inspiró a LasTesis,” La Tercera, December 13, 2019, https://www.latercera.com/tendencias/noticia/rita-segato-la-antropologa/93 7706/. 49 The four women of LasTesis are Dafne Valdés, Sibila Sotomayor, Paula Cometa, and Lea Cáceres. For more, see “La letra de ‘El violador eres tú,’ el himno feminista que se extiende por el mundo,” El País, Deceember 8, 2019; “El vio­ lador eres tú,” YouTube, performance of “Un violador en tu camino,” YouTube, uploaded by La Nación Costa Rica, December 5, 2019, https://youtu.be/tB1 cWh27rmI; and Rocío Montes, “‘El violador eres tú,’ el himno que Chile export al mundo,” El País, December 8, 2019. 50 Cecilia Vázquez, “Las multitudes feministas en el espacio público: Estéticas, afectos y política,” paper presented at XXI Congreso de la Red de Carreras de Comunicación Social y Periodismo, Universidad de Salta, October 2019.

Bibliography Abdala, Verónica. “Una acción del grupo ‘Expresión MoLE.’” Clarín, December 6, 2018. https://www.clarin.com/cultura/mujeres-colgantes-bolsas-plasticas-artistashicieron-impactante-performance-marcha-lucia-perez_0_3SMgEAkt-.html. Acebal, Carlos. “Ni Una Menos: Del grito colectivo a la marea global.” Redacción Archivos del Presente: Revista de Política Internacional, November 27, 2017. http:// archivosdelpresente.com/articulos/ni-una-menos/. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London and New York: Verso Books, 2004. Cabezón Cámara, Gabriela. “Basura.” Revista Anfibia, March 19, 2015. http:// revistaanfibia.com/ensayo/basura/. Carbajal, Mariana. “Coronavirus: Campaña contra la violencia machista en cuarentena.” Pagina 12, April 8, 2020. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/258130coronavirus-campana-contra-la-violencia-machista-en-cuarente. 2020 “Dos nuevos asesinatos conmueven a Santa Fe y Tucumán.” Página 12, May 21, 2020. https://www.pagina12.com.ar/267401-ya-son-42-los-femicidios-cometidosdurante-la-pandemia-de-co.

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Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. “Gender Equality Plans in Latin America and the Caribbean: Road Maps for Development.” Gender Equality Observatory for Latin America and the Caribbean: Studies, no. 1 (LC/ PUB.2017/1-P/Rev.1), 2019. https://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/ 41015/7/S1801211_en.pdf. Fernández, Alma. “‘Basta de Travesticidios’ es un grito contra todas las violencias.” Agencia Presentes, October 13, 2019. https://agenciapresentes.org/2019/10/13/ basta-de-travesticidios-y-transfemicidios-es-un-grito-contra-todas-la-violencias/. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda. “‘We Want Them Alive!’: The Politics and Culture of Human Rights.” Social Identities 12, no. 2 (March 2006): 109–38. Fregoso, Rosa-Linda, and Cynthia Bejarano. “A Cartography of Feminicide in the Americas.” Introduction to Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 1–44. Fuentes, Marcela A. “#NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess): Hashtag Performativity, Memory, and Direct Action Against Gender Violence in Argentina.” In Women Mobilizing Memory, edited by Ayse Gül Altinay et al. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019, 173–93. Fuentes, Marcela A. Performance Constellations: Networks of Protest and Activism in Latin America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. González Rodríguez, Sergio. The Femicide Machine. Translated by Michael ParkerStainback. Semiotext(e)/Intervention Series 11. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Kershaw, Baz. The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard. London and New York: Routledge, 1999. Lagarde y de los Ríos, Marcela. “Feminist Keys for Understanding Feminicide.” In Preface to Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, xi–xxv. “La letra de ‘El violador eres tú,’ el himno feminista que se extiende por el mundo.” El País, December 8, 2019. https://elpais.com/sociedad/2019/12/07/actualidad/ 1575750878_441385.html Mbembe, Achille. “Necropolitics.” Translated by Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. Mijares, Enrique, ed. Hotel Juárez: Dramaturgia de feminicidios. Durango, Mexico: Universidad Juárez del Estado de Durango, Teatro/Coedición Union College, Editorial Espacio Vacío, 2008. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Montes, Rocío. “‘El violador eres tú,’ el himno que Chile export al mundo.” El País, December 8, 2019. https://elpais.com/sociedad/2019/12/07/actualidad/1575742572_ 306059.html Observatorio Nacional de Crímenes de Odio LGBT. http://agenciapresentes.org. Observatorio Nacional MuMalá. Registro nacional de femicidios, femicidios vincu­ lados, trans/travesticidios y lesbicidios de MuMalá, año 2020, parcial y resumen en contexto pandemia COVID 19. http://libresdelsur.org.ar/wp-content/uploads/ Registro-Nacional-de-Femicidios-2020.pdf. Organization of American States Inter-American Commission of Women. Declaration on Femicide. August 15, 2008. http://www.oas.org/en/mesecvi/docs/ DeclaracionFemicidio-EN.pdf.

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Radford, Jill, and Diana E. H. Russell, eds. Femicide: The Politics of Woman Killing. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992. 2019 “Rita Segato: La antropológa que inspiró a Las Tesis.” La Tercera, December 13, 2019. https://www.latercera.com/tendencias/noticia/rita-segato-la-antropologa/ 937706/. Russell, Diane E. H. “Defining Femicide.” Introductory speech presented to the United Nations Symposium on Femicide, November 26, 2012. http://www. dianarussell.com/f/Defining_Femicide_-_United_Nations_Speech_by_Diana_E._ H._Russell_Ph.D.pdf. Russell, Diane E. H., and Roberta A. Harmes, eds. Femicide in Global Perspective. New York: Teachers College Press, 2001. Sassen, Saskia. “The Repositioning of Citizenship: Emergent Subjects and Spaces for Politics.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 47 (2002): 4–26. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002. Segato, Rita Laura. “Territory, Sovereignty, and Crimes of the Second State: The Writing on the Body of Murdered Women.” In Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Américas, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 70–92. Taylor, Diana. Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. LasTesis. “El violador eres tú.” Performance of “Un violador en tu camino.” YouTube, uploaded by La Nación Costa Rica, December 5, 2019. https:// youtu.be/tB1cWh27rmI. Vázquez, Cecilia. “Las multitudes feministas en el espacio público: Estéticas, afectos y política.” Paper presented at the XXI Congreso de la Red de Carreras de Comunicación Social y Periodismo, Universidad de Salta, October 2019. Wright, Melissa. Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism. New York and London: Routledge, 2006.

4

Carnival in hell: kinetic dissidence and the new queer carnivalesque in contemporary Brazil Pablo Assumpção Barros Costa1 Universidade Federal do Ceará, Brazil

As increasingly open neofascist rhetoric takes over segments of public discourse in Brazil, particularly in the wake of President Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, the überperformance of debauchery and unrestraint that is Brazilian Carnival has taken a new political turn and earned its standing as a multifaceted form of activism. Rooted in participant observation, this essay tracks a particular intersection of Carnival and political activism at the heart of a recent experience in radical queer motion and care in the public space of Fortaleza, a city of 2.5 million people in Northeast Brazil, sadly renowned for being among the twenty most unequal cities in the world and, in this larger context of economic precariousness, also one of the deadliest places for LGBTQ communities.1 Given the present necropolitical stakes,2 which I expose in the following pages, my aim is to lay bare how recent performances of the queer carni­ valesque not only deviate from traditional forms of queer pageantry in Brazilian Carnival but also generate a force of political activism by building a coalitional performance vocabulary of refusal that draws from embodied techniques of dissent. I will argue this gives kinetic and sonic substance to what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have called “fugitive planning” and Denise Ferreira da Silva has defined as a black feminist refusal of the racial and colonial script of the patriarchal subject.3 My analysis is grounded in a specific case study, the bloca Carnaval no Inferno,4 whose performance parties both reveal and restore the political use of Carnival aesthetics as a form of critique and activism in Brazil, even while suspending normative notions of critique, activism, and politics altogether. Attention will be given to how participants in this performance collective appropriate sexually graphic funk music and its balança a raba (bootyshaking) choreography5 as performative refusals of homophobia, trans­ phobia, racism, and normative human-centered subjectivity in Fortaleza. Extracting potentiality from Brazilian and global commercial pop-culture icons and even mainstream evangelical/gospel songs, all hardly radical from a liberal democratic political perspective, these choreographic practices be­ come great examples of performative politics, in which politically compli­ cated archives are confiscated in localized acts of refusal and transformed DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-4

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into material blocks with which to build unapologetic worlds of desire that perform another version of queer activism in the face of menacing neofascist social forces.

Carnival and the politics of queer performance in Brazil: from inclusion to refusal First day of Carnival, March 2019. From my balcony I see flocks of in­ formal workers pushing wheelbarrows with Styrofoam boxes, arranging improvised beer and barbecue tents along Fortaleza’s beachside avenue. Unlike others, these folks are not planning to party but, rather, to keep their heads above water by serving the middle- and upper-class revelers their share of alcohol and munchies. The sun is scalding hot as one man pushes his caipirinha cart while keeping track of his partner six feet behind him. She carries a child in her arms. The kid is agitated. They settle down at my building doorstep, so when I climb down the stairs a few hours later to watch a music concert on the beach, I notice the child, age about two, sleeping on a pile of rags carefully arranged on a cardboard makeshift bed by their parents’ cart. My plan was to carry on with my observation of Carnival after Bolsonaro’s election, but I get stuck on the sight of this strange enactment of care, in which a brown child, tucked in rags, peacefully sleeps on the sloppy, broken pavement. Fortaleza is the fifth largest metropolitan area in Brazil. It sits along the coast of the impoverished Brazilian Northeast, a region marked by the cultural and demographic predominance of ethnically erased native in­ digenous survivors and descendants of African enslaved people.6 It is also marked by a hyperbolic concentration of wealth, the roots of which can be traced to the first, highly lucrative colonial economic cycle of the sugarcane plantation,7 as well as by alarming crime rates, resulting from longstanding social conflict along lines of class, race, and gender inequality. In Fortaleza, both native and African descendants are racially written off in public dis­ course as simply “the poor,” a population often criminalized for the rise in urban violence and for not complying with civilized scripts of bourgeois propriety and subjectivity. Ranked among the world’s most violent cities, Fortaleza registers more than two thousand murders a year, 98 percent of the victims being impoverished and of black or indigenous descent.8 Within this already gruesome set of statistics, the LGBT community is particularly victimized in hate crimes throughout the region.9 According to Grupo Gay da Bahia, a nongovernmental organization monitoring crime against the LGBT community in Brazil for the past thirty-eight years, this community suffers a murder (or abuse-induced suicide) every nineteen hours. Statistics hardly represent the embodied reality of constant threat and violence endured by both queers and people of color, but these numbers and their morbid dance inside my head also make me stop the pedestrian traffic

Carnival in hell 61 of a crowded sidewalk during Carnival as I bow down to make sure that the infant is indeed breathing. For a while I thought institutionalized racial erasure explained why Carnival festivities were never too popular in Fortaleza when compared to Rio de Janeiro, Recife, or Salvador, all known for their African Brazilian cultural traditions. But in 2019, the first year of an openly racist and homophobic president in office, I wondered to what extent the discourse around Carnival itself served as a strategy of erasure around here. Just a few minutes before I came downstairs, a prime-time news reporter had a his­ torian on television praising Brazilian Carnival as a “happy encounter be­ tween all races,” making reference to the fact that in Brazil the European tradition of ritualizing the beginning of Lent was appropriated by Africandescendent peoples in postcolonial urban contexts as a way to both express and build alternative life worlds. The “happy encounter” narrative has a strong performativity in Brazil but as the newscast shifted to illustrative images of street Carnival in Bahia, the disturbing and yet too familiar image of hired black men using their very arms to delimit and protect a safe space inside which white revelers could party in peace challenged any tale of happy encounters, for one racial and social group’s peace is another’s physical and affective labor. Coincidently, the Fortaleza municipality had invited Bahia’s landmark Black percussive ensemble Olodum to perform a free concert at the beach as a way to kick off our modest Carnival celebration that evening. A nice surprise, since Olodum took an important role in the grassroots Black power movement in 1980s Bahia, a political movement that used Carnival festiv­ ities as its main stage.10 At the beach, I noticed a tense, rebellious disposition in the crowd as flocks of police agents circulated aggressively among us. A collective cry of protest rose up every few minutes and invited President Bolsonaro to “take it up his ass” (Eh Bolsonaro, vai tomar no cu!), causing conflict between the few who were his supporters and the rest of the crowd. As Olodum played its first song, the vocalist made a pacifying speech, urging folks to get along and have fun together, “because it’s Carnival, and our country just needs peace.” I was somewhat bothered by that lead singer’s conciliatory tone, for he knew better than I that this country’s “peace,” like the performativity of Carnival as a “happy racial encounter,” is predicated upon a great deal of erasure. Unsurprisingly, cis-hetero-racist discourse in the years leading to the rise of the extreme right merged itself with the moralizing rejection of allegedly aggressive and sexually debased Black, feminist, and queer forms of activism. An underlying logic of such rhetoric is that Brazil was just “more fun” and “more peaceful” before feminists, queers, and people of color started “patrolling” public discourse. So the vocalist’s call for “peace” was rendered strangely demobilizing in light of the extreme right’s phobic logics, caught as we were between the debauched spirit of Carnival and the collective venting in the form of disorder (that “up-your-ass” discursive ravaging).

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Two things became clear in that brief excursion: (1) the 2019 Carnival celebration took a clear political turn, the thrust of which carried a refusal to accept the racist and homophobic logic reproduced by the new government and its followers; and (2) a backlash to the obvious political unrest took the form of a proclaimed return to an idealized time when Brazilians peacefully caved in to conciliatory narratives of happy (racial, social, and sexual) en­ counters. Let us not forget Bolsonaro’s successful presidential campaign slogan: “Brasil acima de tudo, Deus acima de todos” (Brazil above all, God above everyone). Clearly such stately crossing of religion and nationalism was provoking a strong popular refusal, whose most vocal and desecrating watchwords had the president assume the passive position in anal pene­ tration. Before going to bed, I got a text from a former student warning me about their unofficial carnival bloco that was scheduled to parade the next day. It was called Carnaval no Inferno (Carnival in Hell). The invitation’s anarchorhetoric was an antidote to these complicated reproductions of the “happy encounter” tale, to Olodum’s mollifying notion of “peace,” and to President Bolsonaro’s version of “God”: “We hereby summon all you demons to celebrate the post-apocalypse. Come resuscitate and terrorize the cis-heterocity of Fortaleza with praise music, glitter, and revolutionary debasement, while also getting a tan. Racists and homophobes are not welcome.” Now, that felt like an improved political twist on Carnival. Carnaval no Inferno (CnI) is part of a recent trend of noncommercial queer partying projects in public spaces that has taken to the streets of Fortaleza, this deadliest of places for LGBT communities. The radically queer and antiracist Carnival coalition (cum arts collective) has actually extended its itinerant parties through the entire year, even while continuing to be chased and repressed by the state military police. The closer I got to this collective, the better I realized how, given the necropolitical stakes endured by queer of color populations, their counterpublic11 performances of sonic and kinetic dis­ sidence, which are central to the party, acquire a force of political activism, as they reject and recalibrate the ideological image repertoire of Carnival as a “happy encounter.”12 This modulation of the affective intensities of refusal and insurgency by Brazilian queer youth forms the ethical contours of what I call the new queer carnivalesque, as it marks an important historical shift in both political and aesthetic appropriations of Carnival by queer people in Brazil. Although highly contradictory, Carnival has nevertheless provided an institutionally sanctioned suspension of social conventionality in Brazil, expanding spaces for queer practices of self-figuration and critical expressivity.13 According to James Green, since the late 1960s and early 1970s, homosexual men have played a central role in the Rio de Janeiro carnival, from samba school parades to the Municipal Theater’s luxury costume competition. For dec­ ades, it was the aesthetic standards set by travestis and drag queens in Rio that figured as the norm for successful samba school productions.14

Carnival in hell 63 Incredibly popular even among straight people, the gay Carnival pageant balls carved out space for queer expressivity in Brazil, having a considerable impact on the lives of many homosexual cultural workers. The carnivalesque in Brazil is thus an aesthetic rife with social meaning and symbolism for LGBTQ-identified individuals and other marginalized groups, who other­ wise endure multiple forms of rejection and social negativity throughout the year. But the particular carnivalesque performativity of the traditional gay Carnival balls, grounded in ostentatious luxury, camp drag queen aesthetics, and idealized notions of female beauty, is no longer the principal form of queer intervention around here. A growing number of minoritarian youth collectives have assembled throughout the country and given shape to fresh new forms of political commentary and activism that shift the way in which Carnival performance furnishes a queer world making.15 The new queer carnivalesque, which is distinguishably ingrained in the street performance organized by CnI, for example, not only engenders a refusal of social recognition and its underlying gendered expectations but also deliberately modulates the constitutive violence that structures racist, homophobic, and transphobic forms of the social into counterviolent en­ actments of insurgence (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1 “Maricotinha.” 2018, Camila de Almeida. A queer performer twirls on a street-sign pole in a short dress as other people mingle or parade down the street.

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Queer embodiment as performance training: choreographing for survival Before we follow CnI’s street performance more closely, a few observations about the labor of minoritarian survival in the midst of assailing social conditions, such as those structuring public space in the “cis-hetero-city of Fortaleza,” might help to underscore the particular politics of gender and race behind this new form of the queer carnivalesque. As I will show, taking care of queer embodiment actually demands recourse to a sum of techniques in performance training. It looks like we are entering a war …, but for many of us this war started a long time ago, we have been in combat for a long time, and we have kept ourselves alive for a long time, and we are not livestock for slaughter, we are not going back home to hide, … we will keep ourselves alive more than ever. They are not menacing, we are the menace, because we are the revolution. … Take care of each other, find strength in each other. Hold hands with the person standing next to you right now, these are the people with whom we’ll confront all of this. [After huddling each other into a collective hug, someone cries out:] “Fire on the fascists!”16 This speech by Monstra, a transgender artist and one of the body-minds behind the creation of CnI, was part of a performance intervention they presented at the 2018 International Dance Biennale of Ceará, in Fortaleza. The performance happened just a few days before Bolsonaro was pre­ dictably elected president, so I cite it here to highlight the ways in which Monstra, faced with a growing sense of a fascist uprising, frames individual and collective survival for gender-defying people through the tropes of movement and care. We are the menace, and we will confront and set fas­ cism on fire; but let us hold hands together and take care of one another, strengthen one another. While oppressed populations in Brazil are not likely to gain access to paid workshops in performance training, attention to everyday pedagogies of sur­ vival do cast light on the entanglements of artistic performance training and an array of vernacular techniques in movement and embodied care, particularly as these notions also support what in theatrical dance pedagogy is called so­ matic techniques17 and their entailing critique of Western choreography. In order to attune to one’s own sense of gender identity, every queer person makes use of multiple embodied techniques that will assist their quest for self-determination. But even as one resolves their journey of selfrepresentation, another set of crusades lies ahead. Facing the world, ex­ posing one’s body on the phobic stage of the social—all of this requires specific fabrications of embodied resilience and readiness, which forces one to study and deploy a combination of performance techniques.

Carnival in hell 65 Writing about theatrical techniques in an expanded field, Ben Spatz ca­ tegorizes gender as an embodied technique, drawing his analysis from Judith Butler’s formulation of gender as enacted.18 Gender, according to Butler, “is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time—an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519).19 Spatz’s claim that gender has much to teach to acting students involves the understanding of embodied practice as a larger epistemic domain, structured by knowledge in the form of “technique.” “Technique is knowledge that structures practice” (1) and is therefore an organizing force in both theater and everyday life. If anyone seeks to get trained in theater and dance techniques, they look for acting or dance classes where they might build “confidence and crea­ tivity” and “become more comfortable in their bodies” (7). Any improve­ ment in the way embodiment develops over time depends upon a “transmission of knowledge” in the form of technique. Students become confident and creative, as well as comfortable in their bodies, because through these techniques “they learn how to maintain eye contact and stillness; how to read the body language and rhythmic patterns of others; how to activate emotional and physiological energies in their own bodies; how to develop, practice, and repeat a score” (7). Embodiment is thus fundamentally epistemic. But as we know—and as brutal murder statistics remind us—the (performative) techniques of gender widely expose the most flammable surfaces of the body to the fire of (necro) political violence. Thwarting normative gender performativity amounts to a double exercise in performance training and countertraining, in constructing and deconstructing habits; it demands a probing of one’s own embodiment and its effects upon the world, the aim of which is utter care and survival. This shift to “study” and “research” as everyday embodied activities that dodge institutionalized violence and death by execution transports me to what Fred Moten and Stefano Harney have called “fugitive planning” and “black study.”20 Trans and queer of color folks have historically endured having a target sign on their backs, and they have for too long endured the “targeted dispossession” of the “settler’s armed incursion” into their lives (17). I propose to understand “fugitive planning” and “study” here not only as a collateral result of oppression by compulsory gender pedagogy and racial violence but, in addition, as performance techniques of endurance. For Moten and Harney, black sociality is a radical experimentation of an undercommons of belonging that performs antagonism outside the nor­ mative notions of politics and critique. In radical experimental sociality, one deliberately dwells and endures in dispossession as a refusal to embody normative vocabularies of the self-possessed, modern political subject. Figuring as a void that sustains the very fantasy of the sovereign subject of modernity from the start is precisely what fuels a form of minor, fugitive sociality that is potentially revolutionary, albeit a “revolution without pol­ itics” and “with neither subject nor a principle of decision” (18).

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This is less a negation of politics per se than a refusal to remain within the terms of order that give epistemic support to Western ideals of the political subject. “Having looked for politics in order to avoid it, we move next to each other, so we can be beside ourselves, because we like the nightlife which ain’t no good life” (19). I want to build upon this overlapping of fugitive planning and partying.21 The embodied practice of “contrapuntal study,” epitomized by the no-good life of the nightlife, is one with the experimental antagonizing that becomes, for many of us, mediations of movement and collective care: following Moten and Harney, “we are disruption and con­ sent to disruption. We preserve upheaval” (19–20); and following Monstra, we move next to each other.22 The jump I make to fugitive planning and study as vital performance techniques of endurance can be reached through more orthodox ap­ proaches. What are some of the body techniques structuring “everyday enactments of the fugitive art of social life” (73), wherein upheaval becomes not only how we hurt but also how we party, which is to say, how we fight—and stand together? I would argue that standing together in the homophobic and transphobic terrain of the social demands the support of multiple movement techniques. A body carrying a target on their back must never fail to practice movement analysis: how am I moving; am I putting myself in danger; is that person staring at me; how can I get out of this unharmed? Here, a convergence between somatic techniques and the poli­ tical critique of choreography shows another intersection of gender (as embodied practice) and performance training (as fugitive art of survival). A moving being, according to Hubert Godard, can for analytical purposes be divided into four interconnected but distinct structures: a bodily structure (the body as matter); a kinetic structure (a set of coordinates and habitual gestures that form a memory conditioning the way we move); an aesthetic structure (the sensible dimension that composes our singular way of per­ ceiving); and a symbolic structure (the psychological and language-based sense of movement).23 Godard’s “kinetic structure,” my main focus here, is described as a neurophysiological economy that acts upon both the space and the temporality of movement. One’s history of psychic injury and perceptive habits—for example, the fact that a transgender person is hy­ peraware of their movement—forced to expand their field of vision for threatening cues, and to combine rhythm and readiness so as to preempt harassment—all of this inform the range of movement one feels capacitated to realize. This, of course, has repercussions in more than one way. Training one’s body to stay alive physically demands a continuous ex­ ercise in proprioception and in what Moshe Feldenkrais has called “mindful movement”: a combination of self-knowledge, moving with attention, and responding accordingly. Feldenkrais—like Frederick Matthias Alexander, Irmgard Bartenieff, and others—developed a series of techniques for opti­ mizing movement in relation to one’s body schema and the social and cul­ tural worlds one drags along with it.24

Carnival in hell 67 While somatic techniques might be aimed at releasing the body’s full potential, of course a movement is not a contained event belonging to the body alone. If Hubert Godard is right in claiming that there is no movement without a “space of action” and that the perception of space determines the very possibility of bodily movement, then said movement is as much of the body as of space.25 Every gesture, every pose, and every movement are al­ ways relational to space. But Godard also asserts that space is an imaginary production: a “distribution of variable density.”26 According to him, per­ ceived space is not homogeneous, the way a geometric figure would be. It is not a mere topology but rather a variation, a gradient of density, which is built according to chance events that are connected to each person’s history. Not only is our history dragged by our body, it is also dragged by our movement and by the very space we perceive in order to move and in which we place our moves.27 Is this not another way of expressing Frantz Fanon’s experience of having his bodily schema “crumbled” into a “racial epidermal schema” by the white world? “Below the corporeal schema I had sketched a historico-racial schema. The elements that I used had been provided to me not by ‘residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, and visual character,’ but by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. I thought that what I had in hand was to construct a physiological self, to balance space, to lo­ calize sensations, and here I was called on for more” (111). Body awareness and space perception for the black person (as for the trans and the queer) are always excessive. The social terrain of movement is invariably racist, homophobic, and transphobic—we keep being “called for more” than mere physiology, as Fanon declares. “In the train it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but in a triple person. In the train I was given not one but two, three places” (112). Fanon’s testimony of black embodiment in a racist world is a fundamental addition to any lit­ erature in somatic techniques and movement analysis and composition, as it marks how the “gradient of density” that is space for movement is over­ determined by the topological force of racism (and homophobia and transphobia.) In such context, dance emerges as immanent politics, for the moving body unfailingly engenders social space, in all its complicated interconnections with the topological violence of repressive and phobic apparatuses. Indeed, that’s André Lepecki’s contention when he argues that choreography, far from limiting itself to a mode of theatrical dance composition, must be understood as the very matter and concept that names the expressive function of repressive politics, since it refers to the smooth arrangement and manipulation of bodies in relation to one another.28 In this light, the police act as a paradigmatic choreographic machine, demobilizing political action in its implementation of certain repressive patterns and paths of movement, always aimed at disarming discord.

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Prone to excavating “choreopolitical” moves that might counter such “choreopolicing” of urban space, Lepecki lingers on the sight of four young black bodies dancing turf29 out on the broken pavement of a street corner in Oakland, California. Turf dancing here—with its kinetics of elasticity, under the rain, and on the stage of a highly choreopoliced urban space—becomes for Lepecki an immediate means of reclaiming that very space for minor­ itarian choreopolitical dissent. Drawing from all of the above, counteridentities of gender and sexuality should be understood as embodied performances whose underlying set of techniques encompasses both a spatial choreopolicing of the body by social normativity and a choreopolitical practice of refusal and dissent that takes the form of process-based, ephemeral couplings of bodies and spaces in fugitive sociality. In this charged negotiation, minoritarian life itself can be described as a process-based performance training in survival and radical care; and one of its pivotal performative accomplishments takes shape when we stand together on the broken public pavement, partying in improvised upheaval, dancing in a tight place.30

Violence as a language lab: necropolitics and the carnivalesque of queer refusal Carnaval no Inferno is far from the grandiosity of, say, an Olodum concert on the beach. On a typical parading day, it feels like a supersize family perfor­ mance, often departing from one of the mana’s (sistah’s) houses or from a local queer bar that lends them a power plug, saving them battery life for the itinerant route. These moments before parading, folks meet to warm up, have drinks and smoke joints, playfully rehearse self-defense moves, flirt, strike poses, take photos. When it’s time to “terrorize” the streets, everybody makes sure their so-called “InfernoSoundSystem” is properly cared for. Pushed for­ ward in a wheelbarrow or on a bicycle, the speakers are poorly connected to automobile batteries for power, evoking a vernacular design similar to those informal vending carts along the official party circuit, denouncing a certain class alignment to the precariat. For the hours ahead, the organizers take turns plugging their phones’ playlists into the InfernoSoundSystem and producing a variety of rhythms: the music includes tunes from pop gay icons (like Rihanna and Madonna), brega (a local kitsch style mixing country, foxtrot, and synth pop), songs from Brazilian evangelical superstars (lip-synched to with ecstatic irony), and of course Brazilian funk music (often of the R-rated artists, cen­ sored by radio stations for their sexually graphic lyrics). The kinetics of the performance include dance, of course, but it is above all a march, a walk through the public veins of the city, even if in stark difference to the spectacular gay pride parades.31 Eduardo Oliveira, a founding member of the collective, told me in a private conversation that they like to think of their performance as more of a catwalk than a parade. And when Brazilian funk plays, the catwalk stops for balança a raba booty shaking (Figure 4.2).

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Figure 4.2 “Inferno Walk.” 2018, Camila de Almeida. People dance and parade through the streets at night.

Butt shaking is of course a choreographic foundation of funk, of krump, of twerk, of reggaeton, of cumbia, of dancehall, and even of mambo, all syncopated transnational music/dance styles conjured in the cultural history of the African diaspora and whose rhythmic gaps are filled by a pronounced choreographic emphasis on the bottom.32 Black and queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton has argued that the figure of the “bottom” is an entangled construct of both sexual and economic debasement in queer of color soci­ ality.33 It is then of particular interest to us how the bottom becomes re­ cuperated as a diasporic language in minoritarian aesthetic production on a global scale. Stockton perceives that in marginalized communities, debase­ ment becomes a central value around which social action is articulated. On the other side of European-inflected concepts of civilization and proper embodiment,34 the protuberant bottom thus emerges as a sign of sexual and economic dispossession that assembles a sense of communality and pleasure, even if overdetermined by lasting forms of shame. I would argue that to shake one’s bottom in a public performance of social, racial, and sexual dissent is to choreograph the switching back and forth of sexual and economic dispossession as an act of pleasure, the af­ fective force of which is able to void some of the negativity attached to the feeling of shame therein. As an embrace of bottom states, the social chor­ eopolitics of booty shaking becomes an act of individual and collective re­ cognition in diasporic affiliation. It is no coincidence that I began this

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section’s description of CnI with the image of kinship and queer sisterhood. Through the body’s undisguised display of anality, the minoritarian subject twists the values attributed to humiliation, to abjection, and to the sense of social exclusion forcefully endured by so many queer of color folks in the normative public sphere. Randy Martin has claimed that in order to figure out what makes a so­ ciality, “attention will need to be paid to what is made in movement to­ gether” (63).35 Booty shaking is a performance that we must perform on a common ground, as a collective, because it is also as a group that we are targeted for murder and psychic violence. The urban space on which CnI marches is nothing short of a battleground. As we party along, babies sleep on dirty sidewalks, homeless teenagers stare at our mobile phones. Like the ground underneath Frantz Fanon,36 this one also oscillates and makes you stumble: it moves and is moved by colonial wounds that will probably never heal, because it keeps feeding off of social inequality and structural violence. Queers and people of color have always been confined to tight places, from the ship’s hold to the ghettos and slums to the tiny maids’ quarters to the walls of the queer club. The collective booty shake in the open streets reckons with such past and present wounds and with their collateral spatial/ choreographic/somatic constraints. As I attempt to shake my booty in a timid fashion, a tiny young girl standing by me says: “Follow my moves. Squat. Swing your butt back and forth; grind it. Don’t hide your chest; show off your tits. Squat and stand at the same time. Like you’re going to take off; but keep your feet grounded. Shake that booty, come on: get ready for war.” Her invocation of war as a social context for the booty shake resonates and multiplies Monstra’s speech against fascism. Following Lepecki’s suggestion that public space is smoothed by choreopolicing strategies of disarming tumult, the gritty col­ lective booty shaking in the midst of passing cars and pedestrians articulates a somatics of refusal and fugitivity. “We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval.”37 To preserve upheaval here means lingering in disorder. While visibly miming sexual intercourse, the swinging of the hips is a performative lan­ guage that translates to no previous meaning: its embodied rhetoric enacts endurance in disorder and dispossession. The raba’s vibrational movement connects social and sexual realms by collapsing the limits between them. But its oscillating goes further: connecting by collapsing the limits between body and thing, subject, object, and abject, pleasure and violence, sex and war, debasement and the figures of social, racial, and sexual otherness. Reading for movement in this (connective/collapsing) oscillation casts critical and choreographic literacy, not on identity or ontology, but on fugitivity. Booty shaking slips through the crevices of the modern subject’s fantasy of selfpossession, sovereignty, and reason. In Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe joins Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, and Denise Ferreira da Silva in arguing that “contemporary experiences of

Carnival in hell 71 human destruction” allow us to develop a different reading of politics and sovereignty than that of modern philosophical discourse and its upholding of reason “as the truth of the subject.”38 In the current neoliberal conflation of war and politics, when the promises of democracy and the modern social contract come crumbling down, Mbembe writes that “governance” is haunted by a disturbed imaginary of sovereignty in which the existence of racial (and I would add sexual) otherness is perceived as an attempt on civilization’s life, as “a mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination” strengthens one’s potential to life and security (18). A similar logic informs current Brazilian governmental discourse in its targeting of indigenous territories, of queer and black cultural makers and scholars in the social and human sciences, as deviant enemies of the state—not to mention of God—in need of control and possibly elimination. Terror and paranoia are hardly new modes of governance. They have articulated a material language of colonialism for centuries.39 Paul Gilroy, a central reference to Mbembe, argues that the slave plantation that proto­ typed our society inserted a fundamental break in the order of language. The extreme violence that was the plantation’s pattern of communication dic­ tates that we recognize the antidiscursive and extralinguistic ramifications of power at work in shaping communicative acts. In extreme oppression, Gilroy says, there may be “no reciprocity outside of the possibilities of re­ bellion and suicide, flight and silent mourning, and there is certainly no grammatical unity of speech to mediate communicative reason.”40 Language and reason being out of reach and violence rendered a component of social etiquette in the white (attempted) governance of Black sociality, one is left with a linguistic dilemma, perhaps even a chasm, which can be resolved only if violence itself is understood as a language lab: a proliferating machinic production of injury, for sure, but also of figures, some of which are prone to kinetic modulation. Eduardo Oliveira again speaks to how they reappropriate the injurious force of language as a political performance: “The name [Carnival in Hell] emerges from the oppressive march of the conservative religious con­ stituency in Brazil that insists in calling us ‘demons’ and in attacking us on a daily basis. So we reclaim those terms and words used against us, but now as a way to get stronger. Yes, we are witches, demons, queers, dykes, faggots, travestis, effeminate, and this city is ours too!”41 Their statement implies the imaginative possibilities contained in queer speech acts. But recognizing the extralinguistic ramifications of power and violence also compels us toward embodied forms of mobilizing imagination. André Lepecki has insisted that contemporary capitalist rationality operates kinetically, by extracting productive and controlled movement from bodies whose “generalized participatory passivity” is tied to a particular production of subjectivity “that conforms rhythmic expressivity to a minimal amount of kinetic and imaginative variables” (154).42 By way of Kodwo Eshun, Lepecki asserts that “power operates predictively as much as retrospectively” (161),

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enveloping not only the material bodies of the present but also dematerialized ones of the past and the future, including abstract dimensions of human action such as the imagination. Queer of color insurrection (against the violent control of bodies and desires and against the distribution of death along a spectrum of social and erotic conformity) must thus include an aesthetic and imaginative brigade. Considered as a conduit through which we can bring forward alternative futures but also redeem and heal some of the wounds of the past, the queer carnivalesque of CnI takes the form of speculative imagination. Crossing a dark alley in downtown Fortaleza, a territory anyone would avoid on a regular night, the mob of deviant demons screams in unison: “Vem desce o bumbum, tan-tan, vai com o bumbum” (Come lower your ass, tan-tan, go with the ass). A heavy bass funk tune by MC Fioti, a twentyfour-year-old straight guy from the periphery of São Paulo who teetertotters between praising and exploiting women’s bodies in his music videos (some getting as many as 1.2 billion hits on YouTube), this is one politically complicated composition, at least if we listen for linguistic content. But in this scream of queer collective imagination, young effeminate gay men and trans, lesbian, and bisexual women turn the song into a weapon of refusal. The crowd squats and shakes butt together, some doing splits on the pa­ vement: it’s collective utter madness. In order to address this performance, we must focus less on what the song “means” than on what it does and allows bodies to do. Accounting for how politically ambiguous textuality becomes appropriated into semantically dense events that activate a culturally grounded practice of queer belonging in refusal speaks to the twisted reversal of violence that gets performed on the cracks of political recognition. Such counterviolence, in its fugitive techniques of perverse listening and sexual kinetics, amounts to what Moten and Harney called “a metapolitical surrealism that sees and sees through the evidence of mass incapacity, cutting the despair it breeds” (73). In such “undercommons” (excess) of listening that metacritically spills the script of representation, we must open our ears to the expressive figures of beat and pleasure, not words. For beat and pleasure are certainly mean­ ingful sensual matters, though hardly linguistic. Beneath representation, there rises an “animative and improvisatory decomposition of [politics’] inert body,” which takes the form of “an ensemblic stand, a kinetic set of positions, but also… of embodied notation, study, score” (73). Sonic and sensual materiality in the political work of the new queer carnivalesque resonates through bodies as affect, not through reason as language. Politically erratic as it may seem, this aesthetic matter is forceful, because it binds a “counterpublic” together, revealing aesthetics as a social operator rather than as a mere support for representation. When the ubi­ quity and reasonlessness of violence render language unusable, the dancing and listening body stubbornly draws objects, instruments, and gestures into performances, revealing the stunning “capacity to break with uprootedness”

Carnival in hell 73 and demonstrating what Mbembe called “the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly pos­ sessed by another” (22). Sound here is content, and race, class, gender, and sexuality are not the idealities but, rather, the materialities of social identity.43 In this party, the meanings of funk beat-sound-voice, of sexy moans, of flamboyant screams emerge as material binds, collectively building minoritarian feeling as movement and as sound content. While music resonates around an ecstatic crowd of inexcusable demons, binding them around a shared sense of care in refusal, the social aesthetics of the carnivalesque—its sound and movement—becomes the flesh and bones of belonging. This is an act of radical care precisely because collectively antagonizing the rhythmic and kinetic conformity of Fortaleza’s cis-hetero public space imparts to the outcasts a palpable sense of support. While clearly on a different register, these queer bodies connect themselves to the working couple I opened this essay with, whose undervalued social labor of care assumed the form of the dialectical image of a sleeping child in the midst of upheaval. Social, economic, racial, gender, and sexual precarity acquire a fractal dimension here, where the very excess of its multiplying points of connection renders a single instance of political critique impossible. Carnival is not a suspension of the everyday, it is not a break in the forever-restored violence of dispossession, but neither is it simply creating of disorder. Rather, it is a particular social aesthetics of lingering in dispossession and disorder framed by practices of care and not always legible rites of reciprocity. I have argued throughout this essay that among the urban queer of color youth participating in CnI, a new form of queer carnivalesque debunks the luxurious pompousness of the gay Carnival balls of the last four decades in Brazil. Through the charged aesthetics of Brazilian funk music and the ki­ netics of the booty shake, whose embodied meaning evokes both sex and the waging of war, this new queer carnivalesque performs a fugitive art of social life. This social experiment also redistributes violent dispositions of public space, reigniting kinetic structures that spin off unforeseen potentialities for both the body and the city: the tight place of social and spatial constraint is stretched into a catwalk, where queer bodies march and sidestep gender and sexual captivity. It is important to repeat that CnI has in fact spilled beyond the Carnival calendar. The group now organizes itinerant parties and artistic events throughout the year. For these queer of color artists of the everyday, selfexperimentation during Carnival and beyond is not just about survival. Rather, survival is turned into a speculative practice: “[reproducing] in its experiment not just what it needs, life, but what it wants, life in difference, in the play of the general antagonism.”44 CnI’s imaginative recourse to “hell” makes clear that this artistic collec­ tive performs from a kind of afterlife. As stated, death by execution for

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queer and brown people in Brazil is just short of a rule. If Mbembe is right in arguing that a late-modern definition of politics is predicated upon the presumption of sovereignty as the production of general norms by a demos made up of free and equal men and women, posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, self-consciousness, and self-representation, the queer “demons” of Carnaval no Inferno remind us that such normative theories of democracy have always excluded the abject queer body from its protocols of recognition. The parade of unbridled souls, grounded in kinetic, sonic, and imaginative escapes from the necropolitical script, nevertheless indicates that despite structural violence and its macabre recourse to death as gov­ ernance in the ever-colonial, neoliberal necro-state, embodied performance is perhaps able to disgorge violence by lingering in disorder and by in­ carnating, not just the figure, but the force of dispossession. From the standpoint of hell, the carnival documented here is the afterlife of what can never be totally arrested or erased, because, like the swinging of the bottom in balança-a-raba, it never ceases to connect wounds of the social with pleasures of the flesh.

Notes 1 A 2010 United Nations report ranks Fortaleza as the thirteenth most unequal city in the world. See UN-Habitat, State of the World’s Cities 2010/2011: Bridging the Urban Divide (2010), https://unhabitat.org/state-of-the-worlds-cities-20102 011-cities-for-all-bridging-the-urban-divide. For further statistics see also Andrew Jacobs, “Brazil Is Confronting an Epidemic of Anti-Gay Violence,” New York Times, July 5, 2016, and Grupo Gay da Bahia’s website, http:// www.ggb.org.br/. 2 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” in Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003). 3 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York and Wivenhoe: Autonomedia/Minor Compositions, 2013); Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Hacking the Subject: Black Feminism and Refusal beyond the Limits of Critique,” philoSOPHIA: A Journal of Transcontinental Feminism 8, no. 1 (Winter 2018): 19–41. 4 Blocos: street parties and performances of different shapes and constituencies that comprise the larger part of Carnival in Brazil. While the grammatical gender of the word is masculine (bloco), Carnaval no Inferno participants refer to their performance party as bloca, fabulating a grammatically inexistent female in­ flection. 5 Another fabulation of gender inflection is found in “swinging/shaking the raba”: in the original Portuguese, rabo is a masculine word meaning, literally, “tail.” 6 For the racial and social formation of the Northeast, see Darcy Ribeiro, The Brazilian People: The Formation and Meaning of Brazil (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000), and Jan Hoffman French, Legalizing Identities: Becoming Black or Indian in Brazil’s Northeast (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 7 Celso Furtado, The Economic Growth of Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963); Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the

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8

9 10

11

12

13

Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998). In 2017, official state-government-sponsored surveys on violent crime showed an overwhelmingly vast majority of victims coming from the local and impoverished Black/brown youth; see Emanoela Campelo de Melo, “Jovem, negro e da peri­ feria é o perfil de quem mais morre no CE,” Diario do Nordeste, December 11, 2017, https://diariodonordeste.verdesmares.com.br/seguranca/jovem-negro-e-daperiferia-e-o-perfil-de-quem-mais-morre-no-ce-1.1863313. As a telling side note, the number of violent murders in the Black/brown territories in Ceará State saw an increase of 178 percent during the COVID-19 pandemic in the first three months of 2020; see Cecilia Olliveira, “Tráfico toma conta, e violência mata tanto quanto o coronavírus na periferia de Fortaleza,” The Intercept Brasil, May 4, 2020, https://theintercept.com/2020/05/05/coronavirus-fortaleza-mortesviolencia/, and Alex Rodrigues, “Assassinators aumentaram 178 percent no Ceará duranteo mês de fevereiro,” Agência Brasil, March 6, 2020, https:// agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/geral/noticia/2020-03/assassinatos-aumentaram-178-noceara-durante-o-mes-de-fevereiro. See, for example, Jacobs, “Brazil Is Confronting an Epidemic.” And for further statistics, see the Grupo Gay da Bahia website. For some of that history, see Barbara Browning, Samba: Resistance in Motion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Charles A. Perrone, “Axé, Ijexá, Olodum: The Rise of Afro- and African Currents in Brazilian Popular Music,” African-Brazilian Culture, special issue, Afro-Hispanic Review 11, no. 1/3 (1992); and Christopher Dunn, “Afro-Bahian Carnival: A Stage for Protest,” ibid. I use “counterpublic” here in the sense put forth by Michael Warner, as the performative institution of a minoritarian public, defined by its tension with a larger, socially sanctioned public sphere. A counterpublic is not just a community of subalterns but a process-based performance of belonging in dissent: it “does not simply reflect identities formed elsewhere; participation in such a public is one of the ways by which its members’ identities are formed and transformed.” Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 57. In a short release sent to me by Eduardo Oliveira, one of its founders, the col­ lective describes itself as “a multimedia network” comprised of “visual artists, DJs, audiovisual makers, producers, and performers” belonging to the “radical realm of gender disobedience, sexual dissidence, and racialized bodies living in the physical peripheries and sociopolitical borders of Fortaleza” and whose ar­ tistic productions include the carnival bloco parties, where “LGBTQ people may aesthetically experiment their existence,” as well as short films, photographic essays, posters, texts, and zines. CnI collective is composed of Darwin Marinho, Dhiovana Barroso, Dora Moreira, Eduardo Oliveira, Eduardo Moreira, Kauanny Pirani, Luana Barros, Marissa Noana, Monstra, Nara Sena, Natalia Moura, Raquel Gomes, Silvia Miranda, and Sunshine. Their social media plat­ forms include https://www.facebook.com/carnavalnoinferno/ and https:// www.instagram.com/carnavalnoinferno/. One of the classic anthropological texts on Brazilian Carnival is Roberto DaMatta’s Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes: An Interpretation of the Brazilian Dilemma (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991). For a phi­ losophy of Brazilian Carnival, see Vilém Flusser, Fenomenologia do Brasileiro: Em busca de um novo homem (Rio de Janeiro: EDUERJ, 1998). For varied in­ tersections between Carnival, gender, and queerness in Brazil, see James N. Green, Beyond Carnival: Male Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Brazil (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Browning, Samba; and Pablo Assumpção B. Costa, “Carnival and Sexuality in Brazil,” in Global Encyclopedia

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14 15

16

17

18 19 20 21

22

23 24

Pablo Assumpção Barros Costa of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History, ed. Howard Chiang et al. (Farmington Hills, MI.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019). Green, Beyond Carnival, 240–41. In 2020, the international media covered some aspects of this shift. See, for ex­ ample: Terrence McCoy, “Politics Crashes Brazil’s Carnival,” Washington Post, February 24, 2020; Katy Watson, “Politics and Protest at São Paulo’s Street Parties,” BBC News, February 22, 2020; Ernesto Londoño, “‘Like a Scream of Resistance’: Rio’s Carnival in Bolsonaro’s Brazil,” New York Times, February 26, 2020; and Ana Ionova, “Rio Carnival Takes a Stand against Bolsonaro’s Divisive Rhetoric,” Guardian, February 21, 2020. “Parece que a gente tá entrando numa guerra (…), mas para muitas de nós, essa guerra já começou há muito tempo, e estamos batalhando há muito tempo, e estamos vivas há muito tempo, e não somos carne pronta pra abate, não vamos voltar a nos esconder dentro de casa, (…) vamos continuar mais vivas que nunca. Eles não são perigosos, nós somos o perigo, porque nós somos a revolução. (…) Cuidem umas das outras, se fortaleçam umas nas outras. Deem as mão a quem está do lado de vocês, essas são as pessoas com quem vamos enfrentar tudo isso. [After huddling one another into a collective hug, someone cries out:] ‘Fogo nos fascistas!’” I transcribed the speech as recorded on the footage of the 2020 short film Veias de Fogo (Fire in Our Veins), produced by Carnaval no Inferno. Somatic techniques have become a fundamental part of performance training, particularly in the field of dance. In movement studies and methods of compo­ sition, the field of somatics includes techniques that focus on the performer’s internal physical perception and experience, as opposed to performance techni­ ques that tend to emphasize the external perception of movement (such as in ballet or modern dance) as observed and judged by a spectator. Some of the most popular somatic techniques are Alexander Technique, the Feldenkais Method, Body-Mind Centering, Contact Improvisation, and Rolfing Structural Integration. Ben Spatz, What a Body Can Do: Technique as Knowledge, Practice as Research (New York: Routledge, 2015). Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988): 519–31. Moten and Harney, The Undercommons. Reading more recent work by Moten, Joshua Chambers-Letson brilliantly ela­ borates on this very point in relation to queer mourning. See Chambers-Letson, After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life (New York: New York University Press, 2018). This philosophical refusal is at the heart of both Moten and Harney’s project and Denise Ferreira da Silva’s. In order to confront the massive injury provoked by “targeted dispossession” on the body of Black sociality, a group of scholars as­ sociated with Black studies and Black feminism refuse a return to normative notions of the political. Much like the demons from Carnaval no Inferno, as I will show, these scholars display no sympathy for assimilationist agendas, upholding, on the contrary, a radical refusal of the very pillars of the modern political subject, which Ferreira da Silva has so eloquently exposed as providing the conditions for the emergence of racial and gender-sexual otherness from the very start. See Ferreira da Silva, “Hacking the Subject.” Hubert Godard, “Black Holes: An Interview with Hubert Godard,” in O Percevejo 2, no. 2 (2010): 13. Feldenkrais goes so far as to assert that somatic techniques of body awareness are able to release the body’s range of movement, creating the conditions for learning

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25 26 27

28 29 30

31

32

33 34 35 36

37

how to realize our “unavowed dream” and helping practitioners find “the means in themselves to perform it”; see Moshe Feldenkrais, Embodied Wisdom: The Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2010), 86. See Caryn McHose, “Phenomenological Space—I’m in the Space and the Space Is in Me: Interview with Hubert Godard,” Contact Quarterly 31, no. 2 (2006): 32–38. Godard, “Black Holes,” 5. For a more detailed analysis of the social turn in somatics, see Jill Green’s body of work, particularly her “Moving in, out, through, and beyond the Tensions between Experience and Social Construction in Somatic Theory,” Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 7, no. 1 (June 1, 2015): 7–19). See André Lepecki, “Choreopolice and Choreopolitics; or, The Task of the Dancer,” TDR: The Drama Review 57, no. 4 (Winter 2013). A popular urban dance style among African Americans, turf stands for “taking up room on the floor.” Here I am citing both Danielle Goldman and Barbara Browning, two dance scholars who have borrowed Houston Baker’s definition of “tight places” as the social spaces within which power and identity are negotiated, close attention to which might assist the dance critic in posing a pair of fundamental political questions: Who moves? Who doesn’t? See Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010) and Browning, “Dancing Samba in Tight Places,” Critical Studies in Improvisation/Études critiques en improvisation 7, no. 1 (2011). Official LGBT pride parades are hugely popular throughout Brazil. According to Jan Simon Hutta, among the reasons for such success is precisely “the Brazilian carnival tradition, which provides a cultural backdrop for public mass celebra­ tions as well as cultural scripts for the joyful ‘inversion of norms’ at such events. … Unlike LGBT parades in Australia, the UK, and the USA, no barriers are erected at the sides of Brazilian parades separating paraders from spectators …, [which] intensifies their character as a mass celebration”; see Hutta, “Beyond the Politics of Inclusion: Securitization and Agential Formations in Brazilian LGBT Parades,” in Queer Futures: Reconsidering Ethics, Activism, and the Political, ed. Elahe Haschemi Yekani, Eveline Kilian, and Beatrice Michaelis (New York: Routledge, 2016), 70. Brenda Gottschild historicizes a continuity of buttocks-centered choreography in African American culture all the way from Africa through the Middle Passage, to plantation dances, to minstrel dances, and finally to many forms of social dances for the ballroom floor. See Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body: A Geography from Coon to Cool (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Kathryn Bond Stockton, Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). “Fear and restraint of buttocks power, especially the dancing buttocks, is a fundamental component in Christianity’s dialectic on the corporeal capacity for sin.” Gottschild, The Black Dancing Body, 147. Randy Martin, “A Precarious Dance, a Derivative Sociality,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 62–77. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Mask (New York: Grove Press, 1967). For a compelling political analysis of performance and choreography in the racist terrain that departs from Fanon’s stumble upon his Blackness, see André Lepecki’s Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement (New York: Routledge, 2006). Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 19–20.

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38 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 14. 39 See Michael Taussig’s body of work, particularly Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 40 Cited in Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 21. 41 Cited in Natália Moura, “Irromper o Tempo, Abrir Rasgos: Fins de mundo e infernos” in proceedings of the XVIII Encontro Nacional da Associação Nacional de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa em Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Natal, Brazil, May 2019. 42 André Lepecki, “The Politics of Speculative Imagination in Contemporary Choreography,” in The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Politics, ed. Rebekah Kowal, Gerald Sigmund, and Randy Martin (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017). 43 See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 263. 44 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 76.

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Absent bodies and melted weapons: art and social change in contemporary Colombia Gastón Alzate and Paola Marín California State University, Los Angeles

On September 26, 2016, the Colombian government signed a peace agree­ ment with the oldest and most powerful leftist guerrilla group in the country, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In October of the same year, the results of the referendum to ratify the peace process de­ monstrated the polarization of Colombian society. Contrary to all ex­ pectations, 50.2 percent of the population voted against it. This was an unprecedented event if compared with similar processes such as those in Northern Ireland and South Africa (Figure 5.1). Against this complex background, we will consider two progressive creative practices dealing with the memory of the Colombian conflict and its aftermath from a primarily feminine perspective. The first is rural and emerged from the traditional culture of a marginalized area where the ma­ jority of inhabitants are Afro-descendant. The second is urban and emerged in connection to contemporary art in Colombia’s capital city. While there are many other significant examples, these two were chosen because they gained public notoriety for their explicit connection to the peace process. Here we will also deal with how performance training—in the sense of an ongoing performative practice through artistic strategies—shaped the ar­ tists’ efforts to promote social change. Rather than approaching these examples from the conventional per­ spective of political art (i.e., “political” as an adjective to “art,” which in practice allows artists to keep their distance from events), we will analyze how Colombian necropolitics—understood as the use of injured or dead bodies to exert power1—“activates the creative dimension of political practice” (see Longoni). Stated another way, we believe that both examples in this chapter embody a common need for new modes of expression due to the urgency of the country’s circumstance: art and politics are intertwined to the point they cannot be separated. Social change is not possible without owning the past, as horrifying as it may have been—and even more so when in Colombia, as of 2020, the violence in rural areas has lessened but has not stopped. Thus, we will ground our analysis on Rustom Bharucha’s perspective on the performa­ tivity of “terror’ in the Global South, as we think this Indian cultural critic is DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-5

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Figure 5.1 Voces de Resistencia documentary director talking to some of the Pogue Singers at one of their houses. The house is a small wooden shack. (ICESI)

spot-on when questioning the “war on terror” master narrative resulting from the attacks on September 11, 2001, and looking instead at other areas of the world where “terror” assumes a concrete and visceral dimension in everyday life. In Colombia, as discussed by numerous scholars (including many so-called violentologists), hegemonic narratives of the war as conveyed by public dis­ course in the national and international media, most of the national and in­ ternational government agencies, and the way Colombian history is usually taught at the institutional level have either oversimplified, distorted, and/or silenced the causes and effects of terror over fifty years on thousands of ci­ vilian bodies beyond the main Colombian cities. The artists analyzed here express the need to confront these narratives, and even though they concur that a peace agreement was the best option for their regions and the country as a whole, their creative practices prove that the process of public mourning is not only just beginning but is still fragile and fraught with conflict. Isolated Afro-descendant and indigenous communities in Colombia have been neglected and abused for centuries in what clearly amounts to in­ stitutional racism. Such is the case in the Bojayá area along the Atrato River, in the department of Chocó.2 The first artistic practice to be con­ sidered is that of a group of Afro-Colombian women singers from this area (the town of Pogue) who perform ritual mourning songs (alabaos).

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They were invited to sing at the peace agreement signing ceremony between the Colombian government and the FARC in September 2016. In the face of increasing violence against civilians in their region, they began to modify ancestral creative dynamics to compose new lyrics for these traditional chants dating back to the time of slavery, and they decided to form a musical group. These changes to traditional lyrics, as well as their becoming a formal organization, as Jerónimo Botero and Aurora Vergara explain in “Singing the Territory,” was a reaction to the various assassi­ nations and disappearances of civilians in the area since the late 1990s, after the arrival of right-wing paramilitary forces to a territory in which the leftist guerrillas were already present and, particularly, in connection with the massacre of May 2, 2002, in the nearby town of Bellavista, in the Bojayá area, where relatives of the singers were killed. The Pogue singers offer a particular performance of public memory dealing not only with mourning but with denouncing and resisting, according to Botero and Vergara. In a metropolitan urban context, on the other hand, the internationally recognized artist Doris Salcedo was commissioned by the government to create a monument from the melted weapons the FARC guerrilla fighters had given up as part of the peace process. She decided instead to make a “countermonument,” not to provide a closing to the country’s past but to provoke reflection on its painful traces in the lives of many Colombians, particularly women. A key foundation of this article is that performance is a more fluid ca­ tegory than formal art disciplines are to discuss political activism based on aesthetic strategies. Since we are dealing with the work of a group of tra­ ditional Afro-Colombian singers and that of a renowned visual artist, this approach will help us to question the prevalent hierarchical duality between “high” art practices and “traditional” or “ethnic” cultural acts. In fact, performance studies as pioneered by Richard Schechner and Victor Turner was born out of the need to question Western hierarchies governing the rigid divide between (Western) theater and other performing arts, on one hand, and performative social practices, rituals, and traditions, on the other. In the same vein, for this interdisciplinary field, the division of the arts by medium is arbitrary. In fact, in performance studies the object of study is not as clearly defined as are the issues at the heart of the discipline: “presence, liveness, agency, embodiment, and event” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, quoted in Schechner, 3). Equally important is recognizing that this type of approach will be disin­ genuous without a foothold in the work of social scientists. As Bharucha reminds us, performance studies provides a more specific focus on questions such as those stated earlier (e.g., corporeality, affect, and kinetics), but we need to engage our analysis as much as possible with specific realities (Bharucha). Regarding the Pogue singers, we will rely primarily on the official 2010 Historical Memory Group Report on Bojayá (Sánchez et al.; the group is part of the National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation) and

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on the analytical and field work conducted by Colombian scholars Jerónimo Botero, a political philosopher, and Aurora Vergara, a sociologist.

The Pogue singers: longing for peace Like the dwellers of many isolated villages around the country, the in­ habitants of Bellavista, Bojayá, had already been abandoned by the state before the massacre. In 2000, in response to the growing presence of a paramilitary group, the FARC deployed in the area, so the Colombian police, then the only government presence there, withdrew completely.3 At the time of the massacre, in 2002, many inhabitants, including those be­ longing to the Emberá, an indigenous tribe living on the outskirts of town, had already fled the area. The government received several notifications of the impending armed confrontation in their region between these two groups—among others, there is proof a communication was sent by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to the Colombian government in this regard—but no protection was offered (Figure 5.2). On May 2, 2002, the battle between the FARC and the paramilitary erupted, and many civilians in Bellavista were sheltering from the crossfire in the town’s church—a sacred space and sturdier than their houses—when the FARC, attempting to hit a paramilitary target, hurled a gas canister filled with shrapnel into the temple. The explosion killed over ninety people (in­ cluding more than forty children). Others were left severely hurt or maimed.

Figure 5.2 The Pogue Singers performing in traditional Afro-Colombian attire in Bellavista (the site of the massacre).

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The church became a macabre scene with human blood and extremities spattered throughout (Sánchez et al.). Due to the intensity of the crossfire between the guerrillas and the paramilitary, nobody except Minelia, the town’s “madwoman,” helped the survivors; she moved them under a roofed area and provided them with salted water to stop their bleeding. After four days and in great danger, about twelve fellow villagers buried what was left of the deceased in a mass grave with only a prayer and without the tradi­ tional nine-day-long funeral rites. The Colombian state abandoned the population before the attack and neglected the survivors after it. Relatives of the victims had to wait more than fifteen years to be able to claim the re­ mains of their loved ones. The process was officially “completed” in 2019; in the end, the fragments of twenty bodies could not be identified, including those from a child of between four and eight years of age. No additional detail is necessary to convey the cruelty and inhumanity of these events. As is well known, Richard Schechner defined performance in terms of restoration of behavior, that is, as “twice-behaved behavior.” However, concepts must be inflected and questioned against specific backgrounds, particularly in the case of regions outside the Western cultural context where the porous interdisciplinary field of performance studies emerged. Thus, while recognizing the productivity of Schechner’s claim, it is necessary to be aware of its problematic ethical and political implications in circumstances such as those described earlier. Bharucha writes: “Arguably, contexts of terror and genocide decimate the very idea of ‘restoration’ in the first place, compelling one to consider ‘how’ new concepts and practices are born of the debris of massacres and the annihilation of normative structures and behavior” (133). In Colombian Afro-descendant communities of the Pacific region, alabaos (praises) are a capella responsorial chants performed mostly by women, although men also participate, on the eve of a burial, after nine days of funeral rituals. They are also sung over Holy Week and during patron saint celebrations. Those called mayores refer to God, the Virgin, Jesus, and the saints, and those called menores talk about the deceased. According to historians, alabaos appeared when Africans slaves took musical and metric patterns from Spanish prayer songs, provided them with new content, in­ flected them with African tonal variations, and established through them a direct supernatural lineage between themselves and the Catholic saints. This cultural practice allowed the community to restore the sense of family identity that had been shattered by being enslaved and served to rehumanize it vis-à-vis its dire conditions (see Maya, 35). Therefore, the singing of alabaos constitutes a practice for not losing hope, strengthening collective identity, and affirming cultural dignity. The alabao culture has been orally transmitted from parents and grandparents to children over many genera­ tions, but there are those who argue that “the spirits are the ones who provide the singers with melodies” (Valencia Caizamo, 13, our translation), thus making explicit the reality of the spiritual world for the community.

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In the pamphlet accompanying a CD compilation of alabaos from the Atrato River area, Gonzalo de la Torre explains that being an alabao per­ former is a special vocation and thus highly valued (AUTHOR?). This conception of spirituality directly linking the past and the present through performing alabaos is key to understanding the Pogue singers’ high status in the community as well as the importance of the Catholic denomination for supporting social cohesion in the Atrato area. While the Roman Catholic Church over many centuries officially engaged in a systematic stigmatization of the practices of subjugated natives and enslaved newcomers, such communities maintained their cultures through individual and collective acts of resistance. Besides, it must be considered that “knowledge based on a Catholic worldview could also become a local know-how, thus acting as foundation for authentic ways of being and cul­ tural values of their own” (Arango, 40, our translation). Alabaos were finally accepted in Catholic celebrations in the second half of the twentieth century, a change influenced by the Second Vatican Council and the liberation theology embraced by many Colombian priests working with marginalized communities since the 1960s (see Valencia Caizamo, 13). As a result, the Diocese of Quibdó, Chocó’s capital city, has purposely in­ corporated ethnic practices as part of its social ministry in the area. In this context, in places like Bellavista, amid the state’s negligence and the con­ stant threat from armed groups, one of the few institutional figures offering support to the community was the town priest, Father Antún Ramos, who allowed the incorporation of rituals of African origin in ceremonies. Official Catholicism has not been a stranger to injustice, but there have been significant exceptions among members of the clergy working in marginalized communities. In reference to this kind of solidarity, one of the Pogue singers, Eugenia Palacios Palacios, composed an alabao honoring Father Jorge Luis Mazo. Father Mazo, who cried for help for communities in the Atrato River area, was killed by the paras in a riverboat on November 17, 1999.

He was humanitarian in the river of Bojayá And with all his patience he was going to visit us /… The panga that killed him Belonged to the paramilitaries He received a heavy blow That threw him into the Atrato River… Goodbye, Father Jorge Luis / You left for no more / The Pogue community / Will always remember you. (translation by Vergara, 73)

Absent bodies and melted weapons 85 Since massacres annihilate “normative structures and behavior” (Bharucha, 13), forms of social cohesion such as alabaos are challenged and even broken, and new forms of expressing pain, anger, and memory in the public sphere are born. Consider, for example, that this practice is part of the traditional rites for burials that could not take place. In fact, Afro-descendant people in the area believe that if the proper rites with singing are not held, the souls of the dead will not be able to cross to the afterlife, thus completely disrupting societal order and community life. As Father Antún stated in November 2019: “If the de­ ceased rest, the living can rest as well” (Uno a uno) (Figure 5.3). The new alabaos by the Pogue singers are even more significant, considering that, according to the Historical Memory Group Report, “the Bojayá massacre was not the end of war along the Atrato river, but the beginning of a new stage of increasing military operations” (Sánchez et al., 81), which in consequence increased the risks of harm and forced displacement for the civil population. In this respect, Botero and Vergara consider that through alabaos the Pogue singers “sing their territory, ‘to inhabit it with their songs’ and (to reappropriate it symbolically)” (11).4 In fact, these scholars have carefully studied how the Pogue singers composed or modified alabao lyrics according to each new development in the area’s situation. In spite of their Catholic background, it is important to highlight that the new alabaos are not ideological, nor do they seek to advance any religious goal or political position. Their goal is pragmatic: telling the government, the armed groups, and their fellow Colombians, “Stop killing us.”

Figure 5.3 Two members of the Pogue singers in Afro-Colombian traditional attire, smiling at the camera. (ICESI)

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Thus, in connection to social change and this pragmatic goal, these songs were directed not only at the community to help them process pain and loss or at the government to demand reparation and protection but also at an outside audience in urban centers who has mostly remained indifferent to the war afflicting rural areas. If the news did not accurately report on what was happening, alabaos did so by affecting listeners emotionally through their melancholic cadence and through the powerful involvement of a col­ lective repeating in a responsorial chorus the events, their demands, and their sorrow for the dead. Regarding their composing and modifying tra­ ditional lyrics, Saulo Enrique Mosquera, a farmer who is a member of the Pogue singers, explains that because of “the world’s situation, and what has been going on in the country, we have been accommodating things so that the rest of society learns that there are people here who feel what is really going on in Colombia. And so that we don’t settle for impunity” (Voces de Resistencia, our translation). When reading the historical records of selective killings and massacres committed during the Colombian conflict from the 1990s to the present, one feels nauseated over the extreme levels of cruelty and impunity present in the memories of the conflict. However, most educated Colombians either deny such situations ever happened or justify them by saying the paramilitary were a necessary evil, because otherwise the leftist guerrillas would have won. In this way, they absolve the state and, of course, themselves of any responsibility in the paramilitary-guerrilla conflict. Against this context, through alabaos, both the singers and the community become agents ad­ vocating for social change at the national level; their strategies include pointing to how necropolitics intertwines with racism. As stated in an alabao by Ana Oneida Orejuela Barco of the Pogue singers):

Virgin of the Candelaria, Patroness of Bojayá Here we come to sing because we want peace What happened in Bojayá That was already warned They informed the Government And it didn’t pay attention Just because we are Black They treat us that way They declare war on us To get us out of our land. (translation by Vergara, 75–76) In another alabao, by Cira María Pino Palacios, there is a line that says, “And go tell the media / not to erase memory,” which indicates the resolve to question the hegemonic representation of facts in the public sphere. In short, in these alabaos the community expresses performatively its specific

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demands, rejecting the role of passive beneficiary of state aid, international aid, or academic studies.5 Regarding the dialogic character of these new alabaos, it can be seen that the tie established by the community in traditional alabaos with the saints, the Virgin Mary, and Jesus in order to dodge the slave owners’ domination and cultural subordination is no longer enough to rehumanize a community and restore its sense of identity when “the human form has been lost” (Longoni). Nor can this tie give them back their connection to a territory that is continuously under threat not only from the guerrillas and para­ military but also from drug dealers related in various degrees with the former and by the economic interests of national and multinational com­ panies. Said otherwise, in spite of mentioning the saints, Jesus, and the Virgin, these new alabaos focus on the pragmatic goals of stopping violence, getting reparation, and claiming back the dead. They do not concentrate mainly on religious or moral ideologies, such as forgiveness or the afterlife. Considering this background of widespread threats and frequent killings of civilians throughout the period from the 1990s to the present, it may be perplexing that a group of women would be allowed to sing their demands without being attacked. Botero and Vergara state that the Pogue singers can use alabaos to denounce precisely because they are “mainly organized by women,” and, as such, “they seem to present no threat to the armed groups” (8). Therefore, we think it is the strategic use of the prevalent idea of the feminine as submissive that allows them to raise their voices. In the words of bell hooks, alabaos shape these women’s (and men’s) “right as a subject in resistance to define reality.”

The politics of performing It must be underscored that it was the women’s participation from an early age in community rites and music, giving them a continuous training in lyric structure and music patterns, that allowed them to respond actively and in public to such traumatic events. We can relate this fact to the “autonomous” feature Botero and Vergara identify in the alabaos sung by the Pogue singers, as their new alabaos are performed, not at funeral rites for specific individuals, but separately for the purposes of denouncing a situation, re­ sponding to specific events, and commemorating the 2002 massacre every May 2 in a regional ceremony. In this sense, they have become an art form, as is stated by the singers themselves. One of them, Cira María Pino Palacios, explained in a filmed interview that the singing was born with her, but when the massacres started to happen and she and the people in her group began to compose their own lyrics, it became an art (see Voces de resistencia). In terms of embodiment practices and what in the West we call “crea­ tivity,” the alabao singers swing their bodies to describe musical phrasing and rhythm. Gestures play a very important role, and performers are never

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still: “The way in which alabaos are performed is very open, and not defined by a specific tempo. It depends on the passion and inspiration of the per­ former” (Valencia Caizamo, 21). Alabaos bring together art and life, the individual and the community, the spirits and the living. The new alabaos by the Pogue singers move from a spiritual communitybased context to a public stage beyond the community in order to affirm the names—in the absence of bodies—of those who have been killed. It is an act of opposition to the necropolitics of both the armed groups and the Colombian state, and particularly to the government’s official reports of the Bojayá massacre: “If the [government’s] victims register, by protocol, did not include the dead children in their mother’s bodies, the ‘alabaoras’ re­ constructed their names and included them in the ‘alabaos.’ If by a mistake someone was left outside the register of victims, the ‘alabaos’ amended this error” (Botero and Vergara, 13). To the extent that the new alabaos are linked with the community’s past, as well as a demand for the right to a dignified living within a context of extreme dehumanization where both the dead and the living are in a state of limbo, we consider it important to remember that, as stated by Bharucha, the recreation of past traditions and myths “may help us see the present not because they are being re-lived in an ‘eternal present,’ but because they acquire new significances and altered meanings in a simulacrum of what has already passed. It is only by puncturing the counterfeit of similitude that the reality of dissimilitude becomes visible” (13). Here we would like to recall that the performance studies field, as inter­ disciplinary and open as it may be, emerged within a Western cultural background rooted in the Renaissance, which prejudicially values the in­ dividual artist over any collective conception of cultural life. In fact, in many traditional cultures around the world, art is understood as part of life and thus is not called “art,” which was the case with alabaos. Even if cultural performative acts from around the world are now included as worthy of analysis on equal footing with Western “art,” we should continue to be aware that the idea of the Western individual artist as superior is still very powerful in our field. The Pogue singers call what they do “art” as a way to locate their performing within the dominant value system, in order to communicate with the state, the armed groups, and their many fellow Colombians who blatantly ignore the reality of what is happening in their country outside major urban centers. Therefore, alabaos are a form of empowerment that works against the grain of hegemonic Colombian culture and politics. As mentioned earlier, the Pogue singers were invited by President Juan Manuel Santos to perform at the official peace agreement ceremony in Cartagena on September 26, 2016, in order to represent the victims of the conflict. Mabel Lara, a young Black female TV presenter, introduced the group as follows: “These women used to wear black to sing to the pain of war; now they are singing to the hope of peace” (our translation). Thus, in

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this televised ceremony, the Bojayá massacre was officially portrayed as having had closure, as a thing of the past that had now become a symbol of hope. However, sorrow and fear cannot simply be over for people who have undergone highly traumatic events for such a long period of time, are used to being left out of national conversations, and have painfully learned to be skeptical of official promises. The alabao singers, wearing white instead of their traditional dress (so they looked like the president and most official guests), sang an alabao that asked the Virgin Mary for peace, congratulated the president, and praised the FARC for surrendering their weapons, but they also remembered how gravely their community had been hurt, stated there should be justice and reparation, and asked the armed groups, including the FARC, for non­ repetition (see Botero and Vergara). Toward the end of the performance, when their lamenting singing switched to a faster beat, they also emphasized that the government’s responsibility does not end with the peace agreement. Instead of continuing to face the public, they turned to look at the president, pointed to him, and sang: “Listen, Mr. President, come near us/and tell us/ what will happen with the other armed groups” (our translation). Not only were they asking him to get closer to their reality, but they were making reference to the fact that as of 2016 communities along the Atrato River were still being threatened by new paramilitary groups and the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas. The progressive political magazine La Silla Vacía ran this headline about the event: “The Alabao Singers Scolded the Government and the FARC” (our translation). As stated at the beginning of this chapter, in spite of the absurdity of prolonging the carnage resulting from more than half a century of armed conflict in the countryside, 50.2 percent of the Colombian population voted “no” in the October 2016 referendum to ratify the peace agreement. However, in Chocó and most other regions with large Afro-descendant and indigenous populations, the majority voted in favor, including an over­ whelming 96 percent in Bojayá. In response, the Pogue singers sang:

Those who didn’t know and voted no God bless their memory That they might better reflect. … To Santos and Uribe Vélez, Sit down to rethink. This dialogue of peace Should become reality.6 (our translation) Notice how the singers emphasize their fellow Colombians’ ignorance about their country’s reality. Following the strategy of traditional alabaos, they allude to Luke 23:34: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

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However, instead of leaving the issue in God’s hands, they focus on telling the two most influential politicians in the country to negotiate their differences. At the beginning of this essay we mentioned that the Pogue singers, while sup­ porting the peace negotiations, embodied awareness that the process of public mourning (as well as justice and reparation) is far from being conflict free. Current events in Colombia give credence to their misgivings. After the presidency of Juan Manuel Santos, in 2018, Iván Duque, a close ally of Álvaro Uribe, was elected president. Duque chose history professor Darío Acevedo as the new director of the National Historical Memory Center. In 2019 Acevedo was the government representative to the official ceremony taking place in Bojayá to return the remains from the 2002 massacre to the relatives. At the event he insisted that “there were only two protagonists of the massacre: the guerrillas and the paramilitary” (Uno a uno, our translation). In order to show how the community replied to his declaration, we will quote from the composed but defiant intervention of Leyner Palacios Asprilla, representative of the Interethnic Truth Commission for the Pacific Region, who was the next speaker. He rightfully contradicted the govern­ ment envoy to emphasize that there were three actors in the massacre: the FARC; the paramilitary, who used us as a human shield; but also the state authorities for neglecting their duty to restrain the attack …. I hope the next encounter with the state will begin to create an environment of trust, but how can trust be created when violence and fear have returned to Bojayá? Today we are with the dead, but also with the fear of what is going on. Today the paramilitary and the ELN guerrillas are near many communities. … Today the state forces continue being as dismissive as in 2002, and then they say they knew nothing about it. We are tired of picking up bodies. (Uno a uno, our translation) Thus, in Colombia, not only are the wounds of war still open but current conditions are not allowing them to close.

Bodies and Fragments: Doris Salcedo Like the work of the Pogue singers, the second creative practice we have chosen to focus on deals with the memory of the Colombian conflict from a mostly feminine perspective: Doris Salcedo’s permanent performative space/ art installation called Fragments. Unlike the Pogue alabaos, however, with their link to a traditional community cultural practice, Salcedo’s practice has taken shape in connection to contemporary art (Figure 5.4). An internationally renowned artist, Doris Salcedo understands sculpture and installation as performative objects that embody the silenced life of the marginalized, from individual victims whose problems are generated directly

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Figure 5.4 Entrance of the main corridor of the “Fragmentos” installation. Bogotá, 2017. (Photo Paola Marín)

or indirectly by the state, conditions of poverty, and human indifference to anonymous people lacking a presence in the vast sea of uncertainties of the so-called Third World. With her work, Salcedo tries to make apparent the gap between those who have power and those who suffer from the im­ possibility of exerting it. Her works reflect a collective effort and close collaboration with a team of assistants, including architects, engineers, and, especially, victims of brutal acts, whom she invites to be cocreators (see Alzate and Olander). In order to understand where Fragments comes from, it is relevant to know about Salcedo’s artistic training. Salcedo studied painting and high­ lights the importance of having had, as her teacher, the interdisciplinary artist Beatriz González, who “included photographical documentation and real events in her work” (Basualdo, 9). As a visual artist Salcedo also col­ laborated with stage designers in various theater productions in her native Colombia, which informed her later work involving architecture and sculpture as “a meeting point” (Basualdo, 11). Then, in 1984, she traveled to New York to obtain an MFA at New York University. She acknowledges that studying abroad was an important step. First, she learned a great deal about Joseph Beuys, whose work allowed her to discover

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“the concept of social sculpture, the possibility of shaping society through art” (Basualdo, 23). Second, her experience as a foreigner strengthened her interest in the political dimensions of sculpture (see Basualdo, 9). In reference to this question, one of her better-known works is Shibboleth, a carefully built, 548-footlong crack across the floor of the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London. As in Fragments later on, the artist wanted to direct the spectators’ gaze to the floor, not to the impressive, high-ceiling exhibition hall around them. (In fact, if they did not look down, they could accidentally step into the deep crack.) The corporeal uneasiness created by Shibboleth, which refers to a word used in a Bible story to identify the enemy by his mispronunciation of it, was aimed at pro­ voking a reflection on the uneasiness of racism, forced migration, and social divides in the contemporary world (see Alzate and Olander). Regarding Fragments, a commission for artists to use melted rifles to make monuments had been included in the official peace agreement between the government and the FARC. The artist initially meant to reject this commission, but she changed her mind when she realized how appalling it would be for someone else to make a triumphal monument that might obliterate the trau­ matic memories of the conflict.7 Instead, she designed Fragmentos (Fragments) as a public art space whose floor is a permanent art installation. The artist planned for it to house a different visual arts exhibition connecting con­ temporary art and historical memory every two years, and the project would last for the same time span the FARC and the government were at war—more than fifty years. It opened to the public in 2018 and is free to visitors. Fragments was built on the ruins of a seventeenth-century colonial house, and its floor was made of thirty-seven tons of melted weapons the FARC guerrillas surrendered as part of the peace process. Its title makes reference to what is left after a conflict, which is not a unified nation, but bits and pieces of one. According to the artist, she did not want to create a heroic artwork that would make spectators feel small; rather, like in Shibboleth, she wanted them to look down. Thus, horizontal space is a key feature of the work: we look up to ideals and heroes, but looking down makes us focus on our connection to the space we are in. A poster at the entrance, in both Spanish and English, explains the space’s origin: how the plan to create a monument with the surrendered armament was part of the peace agreement and how the artist invited “women raped by the various armed groups so that they would shape this surface. Over several days we hammered the metal in order to mark the symbolic cease of the power relationship imposed by weapons. This is the first time a peace agreement allows for victims of sexual violence to participate in constructing a space to commemorate the end of the armed conflict.” The poster also lists the names of seventeen victims of sexual violence who created the molds into which the molten metal was poured.8 Upon entering Fragments, the visitor first encounters the ruins of the old colonial house, whose walls are made of clay and straw. Only glass walls separate it from the newly built space next to it, creating a sense of continuity between

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both. One immediately perceives the presence of the past, how it should not be erased in order to build something new, which is subtly related to the idea of historical memory. Then, upon entering the new area and stepping on the irre­ gular metal floor, one goes through a visceral experience, an abrupt sensation of cold. Knowing—and feeling—that one is walking on thirty-seven tons of weapons that killed and harmed so many people directly connects our bodies to the war, and the act of walking thus becomes an act of mourning. Regarding performance studies, this reminds us of the statement by Barbara KirshenblattGimblett previously mentioned that “presence, liveness, agency, embodiment, and event are not so much the defining feature of our objects of study, as issues at the heart of our disciplinary subject” (quoted in Schechner, 3). Said otherwise, it is not the choice of artistic medium that defines a performance. A permanent installation like this one is performative because it requires the physical presence of the spectator. It embodies and reenacts for every visitor, and always in a different way, a visceral reflection on the necropolitics of the Colombian conflict. If anybody doubts the surrender of weapons by the FARC ever took place (as many Colombians who want to discredit the peace process still do), right near the entrance is a projection room in which there continuously plays a video documenting how the Colombian police received the armaments under the supervision of the UN and how the tiles were made. It includes interviews with police personnel and the women making the tiles, detailed data, and impressive scenes of the massive melting process. The women’s various Colombian accents, skin colors, and clothing show they come from all around the country and are of varied ethnicities (Afro-descendant, in­ digenous, mulatta, mestiza, and white). These women emphasize the sense of relief they felt when watching all these weapons being melted down, the horror they experienced in being treated as war trophies to humiliate the opponent, and how they had to remain silent for many years because no­ body wanted to listen to them, which points to the indifference of both the government and the large majority of the civil society in urban centers who did not experience the conflict firsthand. In terms of performativity and pain processing, one woman explains that when she first went to Bogota and started hammering in the group, it was like having a weapon, because it sounded like a shooting, so she did so with anger. Another one mentions that while seeing how the metal sheet wrin­ kled, she realized women’s bodies were like paper money that is mistreated in many ways: “In spite of being wrinkled, like bills, women never lose their value.” They add that, as they kept working, they started to feel calmer and to realize the possibility of finding peace in forgiveness, but with justice and without forgetting (Figure 5.5).

Fragments: art and society Artist Luis Fernando Benavides, whose work has also dealt with violence in Colombia over the last twenty years, thinks a major achievement of

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Figure 5.5 Detail of the floor of the installation Fragmentos. (Photo Paola Marín)

Fragments is involving these women as participants. In a personal interview, he told us that he visited Salcedo’s installation with Rosa, a middle-aged cleaning lady, and her daughter Isabel, a nursing student, both from a lowincome Bogota neighborhood. He said that once there, both were very curious, asked many questions, and stated that until going to Fragments they did not know how serious and massive the consequences of the armed conflict actually were. Benavides highlights two aspects of this visit. First, Colombia is a highly centralized country where the war devastated many regions, but people in urban centers rarely suffered its consequences. Many choose to ignore them, and others, the lower classes, have no access to the education and in­ formation to know what was—and is—going on outside of the cities. Second, because of huge income and education deficiencies, people like these two women would have never considered that they could have access to a contemporary art space, and if they did have access, they would most likely think the installation made no sense, as it would be completely disconnected from their experience. For Benavides Fragments is a highly complex work that questions the idea that art’s goal is a purely aesthetic experience. He also states that throughout Western art history artists have often been content with depicting and exploiting others’ pain while keeping a distance.

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He mentions as an example Fernando Botero’s works on violence, from his painting on the death of Pablo Escobar to his Abu Ghraib series.9 Fragments is thus in line with Joseph Beuys’s legacy. This German artist considered every human being to be, in fact, an artist, and he integrated humble, everyday materials that had special significance for him into his work. He pur­ sued a process-oriented performance practice that unfolded over time, whose goal was to affect both the artist and the spectators in order to show how daily life and art were actually not separate (see Stachelhaus). We agree with Benavides’s assessment that Fragments successfully brings together the experience and agency of the women victims of sexual violence, the corporeal reaction and reflection of spectators (who may or may not know much about the conflict), historical memory, and contemporary art. It goes beyond social and cultural divisions by blurring the hierarchical divide between “high” culture—that is, art made for specialists by specialists (the artist, the critics, the academics, and the cultured people)—and historical memory. In fact, significantly, Fragments is located at the heart of Colombia’s center of power: near the presidential house and the main government offices. In 2018, the same year Fragments opened, Iván Duque, who had opposed the peace process, was elected president. As seen in the previous section of this essay, while violence has lessened as a result of the peace agreement, people are still being killed and disappeared. Right-wing paramilitary personnel and the ELN guerrillas have filled the void left by previous armed groups and are threatening the civil population in marginalized areas of the country. In this context, one may ask about the purpose of Fragments. On the one hand, it is a work of collective memory. As stated by Ray Mark Rinaldi: “a collaborative effort, a collection of contributions from the artists [Salcedo and others exhibiting their work there], the women, the construction crew and, in a sense, every fighter who gave up a weapon. They all serve as witnesses to events in Colombia, both the brutality and that moment when people came together—however briefly it might turn out to be—to sign a treaty and stop the violence.” On the other hand, even when polarization and demonization of the opponent in political debate in Colombia are still rampant and the current government is trying as much as possible to undermine the mechanisms implemented by the peace agreement, one may experience in Fragments that the fighting did stop for a while, and victims were included in the national conversation, even if their rights are again under threat. Fragments shows that a more lasting peace may still be possible if there is political will and a commitment from those Colombians who may not have suffered directly from the consequences of war.

By way of conclusion The Pogue singers work within the alabao tradition in order to mend deep fractures in community life and memory caused by the impossibility of

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maintaining ancestral funeral rites. From local collective traditions, they project their claims beyond the community and onto the national (and in­ ternational) stage and become a symbol of all victims. Similarly, while Fragments is born within the premises of contemporary art, it focuses on a war waged mainly in the country’s rural areas and ignored in Colombia’s main urban centers. In doing so, it attempts to mend deep gaps in collective memory, particularly with regard to the experience of women victims of sexual violence from across the country. Both practices are based mainly on the perspectives of feminine subjects who, through performative practices, actively mobilize the memory of the armed conflict toward collective ex­ periences that have been—and still are—silenced in the media and the of­ ficial discourse. These performative practices do not take an ideological side regarding the conflict, nor do they assume a moralistic, nationalist, or triumphal per­ spective on it. On the contrary: these practices are grounded in absent and hurt bodies and go against the grain of a society that continues to relegate them to limbo—a society that continues to value the authoritarian war strategies of previous governments, as was demonstrated by the election of Iván Duque. In this chapter we highlight artistic practices that cannot be detached from political practices, particularly in countries where widespread terror informs daily life. In this context, these practices activate historical memory and present it as a site of tension. They express the human need to remember and to create, or, as stated by Ana Longoni about Roberto Amigo, “to reinvent politics from disarmed, defenseless bodies, in order to confront terror.”

Notes 1 Necropolitics is a concept coined by Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe. 2 In the Colombian regions with isolated Afro-descendant populations, basic uti­ lities, education, health care, and other services provided by the government are unreliable or nonexistent. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, along with indigenous communities, Afro-descendants are among the population groups that have suffered the greatest forced displacement, atrocities, and human rights abuses in the crossfire among guerrilla armed groups, the Colombian police and military, and the right-wing paramilitary—the paras, armed groups sponsored by drug traffickers and rich landowners and often working in coordination with state armed forces. 3 Though in Colombia all armed actors (guerrillas, police/army, and paras) “dis­ appeared” people, killed, and violated human rights, paramilitary tactics are the ones most closely based on a form of necropolitics. The objective of the paras is often not territorial control but depopulation, forcing peasants to flee. Thus, they terrorize the rural civilian population by enacting mass killings, gruesome public executions, and public gang rape and mutilation, pushing thousands to escape to urban centers without any means to support themselves. Social activists, jour­ nalists, and leftist politicians in urban centers have also been assassinated by the paramilitary.

Absent bodies and melted weapons 97 4 Besides the Pogue singers, other inhabitants of the region have also composed alabaos, rap songs, and poems and have organized dance groups related to their own view of the events (Sánchez et al.). Most of these works belong to traditional oral culture, and the absence of a consistent documentation effort by the state makes it difficult for them to be known outside their region. Colombian uni­ versities in alliance with institutions in the United States and Europe have spon­ sored digital and media recordings, but such efforts are rare. A valuable example is Voces de resistencia, about the Pogue singers (a project of the Afro-diasporic Studies Center at ICESI University directed by Aurora Vergara). 5 In this regard, the Historical Memory Group Report (Sánchez et al.) states that the arrival of several state and international organizations, academics, and state agencies to town was ironically named the Vest Fair (la feria de los chalecos]) by people in the region, indicating skepticism that they would actually listen to the townspeople’s demands rather than serving their own interests. It also makes in­ direct reference to the safari-style pocket vests Americans and Europeans generally use to travel to the so-called Third World. 6 The far-right-wing Álvaro Uribe-Vélez was president before Juan Manuel Santos. He has adamantly led political opposition to any peace agreement with the leftist guerrillas, advocating instead for their extermination, but as president he was quick to reach a demobilization agreement with the paramilitary that did not actually end these organizations or hold them accountable for their crimes (see the 2005 Human Rights Watch report on Colombia). 7 More than 220,000 people died during the war, and more than five million were displaced, in a country of forty-nine million (see Rinaldi). 8 The artist invited women abused by the Colombian military, the United SelfDefense Forces of Colombia (AUC, the country’s major paramilitary armed group), and the FARC. Over so many years of armed conflict, women in rural areas were frequently raped and used as sexual slaves by the various armed groups. 9 Even if the paintings in the Abu Ghraib series are not for sale, the gap between art and life is still present. No new form of expression has emerged from historical events in terms of Botero’s style. Good examples of the opposite (art deeply in­ tertwined with its time) are Francisco de Goya’s Disasters of War and his Black Paintings.

Bibliography Alzate, Gastón, and Marcia Olander. “Absence and Pain in the Work of Doris Salcedo and Rosemberg Sandoval.” South Central Review 30, no. 3 (2013): 5–20. Arango, Ana. Velo que bonito: Prá cticas y saberes sonoro-corporales de la primera infancia en la població n afro-chocoana. Bogotá D.C.: Opciones Grá ficas Editores, 2014. Basualdo, Carlos. “Interview.” In Doris Salcedo, edited by Nancy Princenthal, Carlos Basualdo, and Andreas Husseyn. London: Phaidon Press, 2000, 6–35. Benavides, Luis Fernando. Interview with the authors, June 6, 2020. Bharucha, Rustom. Performance and Terror. New York: Routledge, 2014. Botero, Jerónimo, and Aurora Vergara. “Singing the Territory.” Lecture presented at the Latin American Studies Association Congress, Barcelona, May 23, 2018. De la Torre, Gonzalo (compilator and editor). Alabaos. Misioneros Claretianos Colombia: Quibdó, 2005. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress. New York: Routledge, 1994.

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Longoni, Ana. “Perder la forma humana.” In Cartografías críticas I, edited by Ileana Diéguez, Paola Marín, and Gastón Alzate. Los Angeles: Karpa, 2018. www.calstatela.edu/al/karpa/longoni. Maya, Adriana. “Africa: Legados espirituales en La Nueva Granada, siglo XVII.” Historia Crí tica 12, no. 1 (1996): 29–41. Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Rinaldi, Ray Mark. “A Peace Monument in Colombia Is Caught in a Crossfire.” New York Times, October 23, 2019. Sánchez, Gonzalo (coord.), et al. Bojayá: la guerra sin límites. Historical Memory Group Report on Bojayá. Bogotá: CNRR—Grupo de Memoria Histórica, Ediciones Semana, 2010. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2002. Stachelhaus, Heiner. Joseph Beuys. Translated by Joan Godo Costa. Barcelona: Parsifal Ediciones, 1990. Uno a Uno: Bojayá—memoria atrasada. Diocese of Quibdó and PAZIPAZ, produ­ cers. 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmzOJ1y-S4g. Valencia Cáizamo, Nelly. “Alabaos y chigualos-gualíes del Chocó traídos al esce­ nario recitalístico del cantante lírico.” Master’s thesis, EAFIT University, Medellín, 2015. https://repository.eafit.edu.co/bitstream/handle/10784/8048/Nelly_ ValenciaCaizamo_2015.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y. Vergara, Aurora. “Suffering While Black: Resistance amid Deracination.” In Afrodescendant Resistance to Deracination in Colombia. London: Palgrave McMillan, 2018, 69–80. Voces de resistencia: Cantadoras de Pogue. ICESI University, Cali, producer. 2016–2017.

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Queering Abiayala: personal and political cartographies of the Indigenous Americas Tiffany D. Creegan Miller Colby College

Diversidad sexual y pueblos originarios Hay demasiados obstáculos, prejuicios, odios, autoodios que trabajar. Vital y necesario hablar de racismo, clasismo, machismo, homolesbobitransfobia y misoginia que se reproduce dentro del sector LGBTIQ+, para mí es preocupante como el heteropatriarcado, la heteronorma y el gaypitalismo ha [sic] venido a alinear demasiado a la población de la diversidad sexual y establece [sic] todos estos ismos de violencia cotidiana y sistemática. Y algo muy vital es revisar como el fundamentalismo religioso ha venido a colonizar nuestras cuerpas, nuestros deseos y como ha querido borrar la cosmogonía maya en muchos de sus sentidos, e implantar un binarismo de género, siendo que antes de la violenta invasión española al territorio de Abya Yala, existía en muchos pueblos armonía sexoafectiva diversa. Hay que hacer un constante ejercicio de autocrítica en ese sentido. Revisar nuestras relaciones sociales y sexoafectivas y nuestras contradicciones con las otras, otros y otres.1

Sexual diversity and the original inhabitants There are too many obstacles, prejudices, hatreds, self-hatreds to work against. Vital and necessary is it to talk about racism, classism, machismo, homolesbobitransphobia, and misogyny that are reproduced within the LGBTIQ+ sector, for me it is worrying how heteropatriarchy, heteronormativity, and gay capitalism has [sic] come to align the population of sexual diversity too much and establishes [sic] all these isms of daily and systematic violence. And something very vital is to review how religious fundamentalism has come to colonize our bodies, our desires, and how it has wanted to erase the Maya cosmogony in many of its senses, and to implant a gender binarism, being that before the violent Spanish invasion of the territory Abya Yala, there was diverse sexual-affective harmony in many towns. You have to do a constant exercise of self-criticism in this regard. Review our social and sexual-affective relationships and our contradictions with others, others, and others. —Manuel Tzoc Bucup, Facebook, June 28, 2020 DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-6

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Manuel Tzoc Bucup is a K’iche’ Maya urban performance artist and visual poet based in Guatemala City whose work advances the visibility of LGBTIQ+ Indigenous identities in Guatemala.2 Addressing the intersection of ethnic, gender, and sexual identities through a variety of artistic media and expressions, Tzoc Bucup productively complicates issues of love, sex, desire, eroticism, racism, and homophobia. Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios elaborate on the circulation and thematic orientation of his work: “Tzoc Bucup publishes his work through independent publishing houses and editoriales cartoneras (La Maleta Ilegal and Santa Muerte Cartonera) or small presses like Catafixia dedicated to promoting the work of new and daring writers. He typically sells his work at craft fairs, markets, and independent bookstores or through friends and acquaintances. … His performance work is centered on issues of ethnic and sexual identity, often playing with the traje as one of the most recognizable symbols of the former” (174–75). Notable examples of Tzoc Bucup’s work include his libros cartoneros, or artisan books, such as the erotic gay poetry collection Gay(o) (2015). That same year, he also created a visual art installation, Cuerpos tecnológicos (Technological bodies, 2015) which was part of Queerpoéticas (Queerpoetics), a project based in Guatemala that seeks to literally and metaphorically make visible corporal and sexual dissidence. In Piel (Skin, 2016), a street performance that took place in Guatemala City’s main square across from the National Palace of Culture in October 2016, Tzoc Bucup shed all of his clothes and was left wearing nothing but a bodysuit that was made out of his mother’s traditionally woven corte. As one of the leading pioneers in Guatemala—among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists—advocating for LGBTIQ+ identities, Tzoc Bucup works through a variety of media and artistic formats to promote LGBTIQ+ rights and their visibility within the Guatemalan cultural and literary milieu. This chapter focuses on Tzoc Bucup’s performance art at the intersection of queer and pan-Indigenous identities, specifically his performance of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala in collaboration with the Chilean performance artist Rodrigo Arenas Carter. The duo performed the twenty-minute piece in July 2016 in Santiago, Chile, at Encuentro, an academic conference and performance festival organized by the Hemispheric Institute of New York University. A video of the performance is now digitally archived at the Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL). In this chapter, I use the Indigenous Maya concept of cha’anil, as elaborated by Yucatec Maya scholar Genner Llanes Ortiz, to analyze the performance of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala. Using the Indigenous concept of cha’anil highlights the importance of embodiment inherent in the performance as a particular Maya episteme, or way of knowing. In my view, because The Reestablishment of Abya Yala invites, if not requires, the audience’s participation, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter create space for allyship and collective action that undergirds Indigenous LGBTIQ+ activism. By grounding

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my analysis in Maya epistemologies instead of in arbitrary categories imposed from Western academic disciplines, I build on the work of Arturo Arias in Recovering Lost Footprints (2017), Gloria E. Chacón in Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures (2018), and Paul M. Worley and Rita M. Palacios in Unwriting Maya Literature (2019). In this essay, I will use the Maya concept of cha’anil specifically to show how Manuel Tzoc Bucup and Rodrigo Arenas Carter queer the original sexual encounters of Abiayala between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples through their rewriting of history in The Reestablishment of Abya Yala.3 Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter’s performance explicitly brings the body into dialogue with alternative, or queer, forms of mapping. In their piece, which is completely absent of dialogue, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter are the only actors on stage. After destroying a map of Latin America, presumably dating to the sixteenth century, the two men remove each other’s clothing, embrace in a consensual kiss, and paint their own map using their bodies as a canvas. The crude black lines on their skin do not create a whole map until the men are standing side by side while facing the audience, allowing spectators to bring both bodies into dialogue through the cha’anil to represent the wholeness and totality of Latin America. Similar to the way that the expression “Abiayala” in the Guna (Kuna) language connects different Indigenous communities and their disparate experiences, audiences are able to visualize the Americas as a cohesive whole only through the unity and physical contact of the performance artists’ skin to join their embodied maps. The performers then break the fourth wall, moving into the audience’s spaces. In analyzing the performance through/as cha’anil, I argue that The Reestablishment of Abya Yala productively renegotiates the participation of audience members. Though spectators may not be physically active during this short performance piece or other examples of cha’anil, they engage in a self-reflective awareness that is a highly active process. When the actors break the illusory fourth wall at the end of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala, the spectators—those in the live audience seated in the auditorium as well as the Internet users accessing the file later through the HIDVL—are left to reflect on their own positionality vis-à-vis LGBTIQ+ initiatives and advocacy. Given this diglossic process of participation in the distinct media and performance modalities, I propose a broader recognition of the nuances of audience participation in the cha’anil to reflect on the transformative value of performance art like The Reestablishment of Abya Yala to engender social change for Indigenous LGBTIQ+ communities and their allies in Guatemala and across Abiayala. Doing so, then, allows for the kind of panIndigenous activism that the concept of Abiayala is meant to foster. While subtle, Tzoc Bucup’s performance is activism for several reasons. Not only does it create space for allyship and pan-Indigenous connection, but Tzoc Bucup’s very existence as a public figure with published performances is

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activism. Guatemala is one of the most violent countries in Abiayala (Benson et al. 2011; Nelson 2009; McAllister and Nelson 2013; Smith and Offit 2010), with what Amnesty International (2017) describes as epidemic-level murder rates. Within this social fabric of everyday violence, it is an exceptionally violent place for marginalized individuals, including those who are LGBTIQ+ identified (Conaway 2010; Goldin and Rosenbaum 2009; Morales Trujillo 2010; Musalo and Bookey 2013). While consensual, noncommercial homosexual sexual activity has been legal since 1871, Guatemala has yet to join other countries in Latin America where same-sex marriage is legally recognized (Costa Rica, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador), and protections for gender and sexual orientation are not part of the country’s antidiscrimination laws. Though Guatemalan LGBTIQ+ activists have described these events as steps toward progress, there is still work to be done for activists and artists like Manuel Tzoc Bucup, particularly following the 2019 presidential election of Alejandro Giammattei, who campaigned on an anti-LGBTIQ+ platform against sex-same marriage as well as against reproductive rights, including abortions. During the election cycle, Tzoc Bucup joined other LGBTIQ+ artists and activists to publicly denounce Giammettei’s political platform. Beyond speaking out against discriminatory politics, as an artist and activist Tzoc Bucup creates artisan books and performance art that address themes of gender and sexuality and explicitly make such topics visible in society. In a country like Guatemala, where gendered violence is ubiquitous, the continued existence and out visibility of nonheteronormative artists like Manuel Tzoc Bucup constitute an act of resistance. While the struggle for LGBTIQ+ rights is ongoing, in Guatemala there have been advances in recent years. Perhaps most notable is the election of Sandra Morán, the first openly gay legislator, to the Guatemalan Congress in 2016. The election of Morán, a member of the left-leaning political party Convergence, was momentous, particularly given the conservative stance of Guatemala on LGBTIQ+ issues.

Nonheteronormative subjectivities across Abiayala With the title The Reestablishment of Abya Yala and specifically the expression “Abya Yala,” Manuel Tzoc Bucup and Rodrigo Arenas Carter invoke the Americas. A term from the Guna (Kuna) language of Panama, the expression means “land of vital potential” or “land in its full maturity” and refers to the American continent as a whole. Indigenous studies scholars and prominent Indigenous activists across the hemisphere have adopted this term to broadly refer to the distinct Indigenous groups and movements across the Americas. Arturo Arias, Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, and Emilio del Valle Escalante (Emil’ Keme) reference Bolivian Aymara leader Takir Mamani to note that “Abya Yala” is a term Indigenous activists can use that was created by an Indigenous group within the Americas to self-identify with, rather than names imposed by their colonizers, non-Indigenous academics, or other foreigners (10). Arias, Cárcamo-Huechante, and del Valle

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Escalante (Keme) further explain that it is a “call of conscience, an ethical decision, one of justice and responsibility, that discloses an Indigenous will to power” (40). As is true with many Indigenous languages across the hemisphere, there is variability in its orthography. As Hannah Burdette notes, it was first introduced as “Abya Yala” in the 1970s when “Aymara activist Takir Mamani of Bolivia proposed adopting the expression as an alternative name for the Americas. … In 2010, however, the Guna General Congress voted to change the spelling to Abiayala, in accordance with local language standardization efforts, and in 2017 the Abiayala Working Group of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association adopted the new spelling as well, based on the recommendation of Guna scholar Sue Haglund” (xi). Similar to Burdette, despite the prevalence of the spelling “Abya Yala,” in this chapter I have also opted to employ the orthography now in use by the Guna nation to respect the Guna’s linguistic sovereignty, on the one hand, and to differentiate “Abiayala” as a synonym for “Latin American,” on the other. In a note on the Hemispheric Institute website, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter explicitly explain their use of the expression: “Abya Yala was the name given by the Kuna People to what is currently known as The Americas. By bringing back this term, we develop a poetic problematization of topics such as gender, racism, and dissidence. Our proposal explores the possibilities of the body to reconfigure the political and personal cartography of our continent.” Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter’s performance, then, centers on the politics of queerness transcending geopolitical borders to establish a dialogue among Indigenous communities across the hemisphere, not just Tzoc Bucup’s native Guatemala. Given the continental implications of Abiayala in the fields of Native American and Indigenous studies, scholars and activists alike have advocated for analyses that bring different literatures, cultures, and sociopolitical contexts into a comparative frame. This approach prioritizes the development of methodologies that recognize similar Indigenous experiences with colonial violence and the increased connectivity of cultures, texts, and peoples across the globe. Jodi A. Byrd, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma, for example, uses the term “transit” to note the similarities and shared experiences of colonial violence and genocide among different Indigenous groups (xxi). Similarly, Daniel Heath Justice, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, signals an emerging dialogue among Indigenous writers from across disparate parts of the globe: “Whether in Turtle Island, Kanata/ Canada, Samiland, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, the United States, or other homelands, territories, and nation-states, scholars of Indigenous literatures are reaching out, learning about themselves and one another, looking for points of connection that reflect and respect both specificity and shared concern, localized contexts and broader concerns, rooted perspectives and global viewpoints” (344). His multiperspectivist approach evidences an awareness of the shared experiences of struggle and oppression

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that are common across multiple groups of native peoples in far-reaching geographic locations. Similarly, Chadwick Allen has proposed a “transindigenous” methodology “to acknowledge the mobility and multiple interactions of Indigenous peoples, cultures, histories, and texts” (xiv). By inviting distinct fields of study into conversation, he pushes for taking global Indigenous studies a step further through the use of the prefix “trans-” to underscore the productively complex relationships and tensions when Indigenous literatures are considered alongside cultural production from other Indigenous traditions.4 In the performance of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter follow in this line of Indigenous intellectuals, activists, and their allies who have called for a comparative framework. What is unique in their contribution, however, is their focus on underscoring the similar experiences of marginalization and oppression that Indigenous LGBTIQ+ people across the Americas share. Through the panIndigenous connections implicit in their use of the expression “Abiayala,” Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter advocate for a linguistic and embodied reestablishment of the structures of power that have historically marginalized Indigenous LGBTIQ+ communities across the hemisphere. The presence of nonheteronormative identities in Indigenous communities throughout the Americas is not a new phenomenon, even though they have not always been on public display. For example, there has been much academic scholarship and activist attention to what are known as Two-Spirit beings, a pan-Indigenous umbrella term that refers to Indigenous people who identify as a third gender (or other gender variant) beyond the traditional gender binary (Driskill et al. 2011; Morgensen 2011). For example, in Daniel Heath Justice and James H. Cox’s foundational 2008 publication “Queering Native Literature, Indigenizing Queer Theory,” they underscore the work of Craig Womack, Qwo-Li Driskill, Mark Rifkin, Bethany Schneider, and Lisa Tatonetti. For them, this shift in the field in “utilizing the interpretive methods of queer theory … has resulted in much more thoughtful, attentive, and rigorous scholarship that includes Native subjectivities at the center of analytical concern, not just [at] the margins to reinforce the ‘normalcy’ of white queer expression” (xiv). Turning our attention to Latin America, in the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter Tzoc Bucup explains that “antes de la violenta invasión española al territorio de Abya Yala, existía en muchos pueblos armonía sexoafectiva diversa” (Before the violent Spanish invasion of the Abya Yala territory, diverse sexual-emotional harmony existed in many villages). In pre-Hispanic Maya communities, for example, historically homosexual desire and sexuality were part of ritual activities (Sigal 2000), which is evident in the paintings in the Naj Tunich caves in the Petén region of Guatemala (Stone 1995). Nevertheless, not all pre-Hispanic Mayas were tolerant of queer forms of sexuality, as is evident from the multiple insults in the Libros de Chilam Balam against the Itzá, who practiced sodomy and homoeroticism in public rituals.

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In Guatemala such conflicting attitudes have continued into the present day. Indigenous LGBTIQ+ people—including but not limited to Tzoc Bucup—who do not conform to heteronormative traditional gender identities are subject to criticism, marginalization, and, frequently, violence. According to Amnesty International, as part of the Northern Triangle of Central America, along with Honduras and El Salvador, Guatemala is among one of the most violent countries in the world. Though it is difficult to obtain accurate data from the Guatemalan government, “there is evidence that Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Intersex People (LGBTI) are particularly exposed to violence in the Northern countries, and that this is related intrinsically to the multiple forms of discrimination that LGBTI people face in the different spheres of their family and working life, as part of society more widely and institutionally, on the basis of their gender identity and/or sexual orientation” (Amnesty International 2017). In The Reestablishment of Abya Yala, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter draw attention to the oppression of LGBTIQ+ people across Abiayala by rewriting the initial colonial sexual encounters between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples. With the colonial maps at the beginning of the performance and the naked bodies of an Indigenous and a non-Indigenous person, they queer those initial interracial sexual experiences between the Indigenous and their European conquerors. Instead of a heteronormative interaction between a cisgender male and female, the event features two male bodies. Further queering this historic event, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter perform a sexual act based on consent on stage. Though there were exceptions, the violence and power dynamic of the Conquest were not conducive to sexual relations built on mutual trust and consent of the sort that we witness through the interactions of Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter. The tenderness between the two is hardly reminiscent of the force that accompanied many of the initial sexual relations in the Americas that physically and figuratively united Abiayala with Europe during the Conquest. Considering the situation in Tzoc Bucup’s native Guatemala, the lack of violence in The Reestablishment of Abya Yala is notable. Violence as a theme becomes conspicuous by its very absence. In Guatemala, the years following the genocidal armed conflict of 1960 to 1996 have not seen a decrease in levels of violence; rather, the opposite is true. Violence rates in Guatemala are currently higher now than during the civil war, with the majority of such acts occurring in the context of interpersonal relationships (Benson et al. 2011; McAllister and Nelson 2013; Nelson 2009; Smith and Offit 2010). This everyday violence is manifested in the forms of domestic violence and femicide, for example. In Guatemala it is inherently dangerous to be a woman, and it is especially dangerous to present as a gendered identity that defies social norms, as is the case for LGBTIQ+ people (Conaway 2010; Goldin and Rosenbaum 2009; Morales Trujillo 2010; Musalo and Bookey 2013). Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter’s refusal to disappear and blend in with the status quo in a society where violence is an omnipresent part of life is a courageous way to contribute to

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changes in Guatemala’s sociopolitical milieu. It reminds audiences and fellow citizens of the diversity in Guatemala not just in terms of ethnicity but in terms of sexual orientation as well. In Guatemala, where violence has become the norm, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter queer their performance by deviating from that norm and offering an alternative to the pervasive quotidian forms of gendered violence.

Cha’anil and performance Though the concept of performance has a long academic history of scholastic debate, as Yucatec Maya anthropologist Llanes Ortiz notes, the theoretical concept of “performance” and its diverse manifestations originate in Anglo-Saxon traditions. For him, the term refers to the “prácticas culturales realizadas principalmente por medio del cuerpo” (cultural practices carried out mainly through the body). Underscoring the embodiment inherent in performance, he explains that it includes “los gestos faciales, el movimiento de manos o pies, o los sonidos producidos por la garganta. Dichas actividades pueden tener una función práctica o estética; como serían las actividades agrícolas o culinarias, así como las danzas, los cantos, la música, los rezos o la narración oral” (facial gestures, movement of hands or feet, or sounds made by the throat. These activities may have a practical or aesthetic function; such as agricultural or culinary activities, as well as dances, songs, music, prayers or oral narration). Beyond the embodiment, for Llanes Ortiz, another key component of the performance in the Anglo-Saxon sense is the temporal structuring and often repetition of the event: “Un principio básico de éstas es que su repetición está predeterminada, es decir, existe un modo específico de transmitirlas y de aprenderlas” (A basic principle of these is that their repetition is predetermined, that is, there is a specific way of transmitting and learning them) (28). Given these parameters, Llanes Ortiz proposes the Yucatec Maya concept of cha’anil for performance, though he is careful to recognize that it is not an exact equivalent; this is often the case for Western and non-Western concepts, as they do not translate neatly from one culture to another. Llanes Ortiz offers the following explanation of the cha’anil: Se refiere a una actividad concebida para producir deleite, agrado, o bien, un fuerte sentimiento (ki’óoltsil), a través de la acción de sus intérpretes, del sonido del canto, o de la palabra recitada en público. Dicho en español yucateco, la gente puede “gustar de” eventos como la danza de “la cabeza de cochino”, la corrida de toros, el teatro, la televisión o el cine. La noción cha’anil designa algo que “gusta” (ku cha’antik). It refers to an activity designed to produce delight, pleasure, or a strong feeling (ki’óoltsil), through the action of its interpreters, the sound of

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singing, or the word recited in public. Said in Yucatecan Spanish, people can “like” events such as the “head of a pig” dance, the bullfight, the theater, television or cinema. The notion cha’anil designates something that is “liked” (ku cha’antik). (29) Noting that the concept of cha’anil has historical roots in the Classic Maya period, Llanes Ortiz emphasizes its role in the telling of oral histories within communities (u cha’anil kaaj). Though the cha’anil comes from Yucatec Maya cultural traditions and understandings, I am also careful to note that the concept does not exactly translate to the context of K’iche’ Maya performance art, as is the case with Tzoc Bucup’s work analyzed here. Perhaps most similar to the Yucatec cha’anil is the K’iche’ concept of ch’aaweem, which loosely translates as “hablar, visitar” (to speak, to visit) (“Ch’aaweem”). As the definition denotes, the term emphasizes a performed orality, typically used to describe public discourses of importance. For example, K’iche’ Maya linguists Pedro Florentino Ajpacajá Túm, Manuel Isidro Chox Tum, Francisco Lucas Tepaz Raxuleu, and Diego Adrian Guarchaj Ajtzalam provide the following sample sentence in their dictionary for the term, “Chwe’q kinch’aaw in pa lee choomaal pa q’atb’altziij” (emphasis added), which translates as “Mañana hablaré en la sesión de la municipalidad” (Tomorrow I will speak in the session of the municipality) (“Ch’aaweem,” 61). The Yucatec concept of cha’anil is productive in the K’iche’ context because of its emphasis on embodiment, as well as on the transmission of knowledge, which is generally meant to entertain the spectators present at the event. Given that Indigenous epistemologies have produced concepts such as Abiayala, recurring to a pan-Indigenous framework through a methodology like cha’anil is only appropriate in the analysis of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala. Though this is a much-distilled definition of cha’anil, what is relevant for our purposes here is how performance is a conduit of sociopolitical change and activism in non-Western contexts, such as Maya linguistic revitalization projects in Llanes Ortiz’s native Yucatán. Significantly, even if spectators do not necessarily speak an Indigenous language, Llanes Ortiz underscores that all meaning of the cha’anil is not lost. Non-Indigenous language speakers are still able to appreciate the musical qualities of the performance: “Considero que cha’anil (fiesta, o espectáculo) tiene un gran potencial para la revitalización lingüística, ya que permite al espectador apreciar la belleza de las lenguas indígenas aunque no las hable. A través del cha’anil se accede a los sentidos del idioma, aun sin conocerlo” (I consider that cha’anil (party, or show) has great potential for linguistic revitalization, as it allows the viewer to appreciate the beauty of indigenous languages even if they do not speak them. Through the cha’anil the senses of the language are accessed, even without knowing it) (30). Thus,

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even if they do not understand the meaning behind the words, for Llanes Ortiz, the potential still exists for audience members to get something out of the performance. Despite language barriers, through the concept of cha’anil Llanes-Ortiz explains that spectators, including those who do not necessarily speak the Indigenous languages in question, may productively engage in the social struggle to revitalize and preserve these languages. In other words, audience members are always and inherently involved in the social project of the performance by virtue of being there and partaking of said performance. Returning to Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter’s work, by analyzing the performance of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala through the Maya concept of cha’anil, we can better understand the opportunities for audience members of the performance to become meaningfully engaged in the LGBTIQ+ social struggle that Indigenous peoples and their allies have launched across the Americas. Taking their advocacy beyond the brick and mortar walls of the theater, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter do not limit their performance to the physical confines of the stage. Breaking the illusory fourth wall, they exit using the steps to the side of the stage and walk through the audience holding hands, serving as a poignant example of what Worley and Palacios describe as Tzoc Bucup’s “explorations of audience-artist relationships” (174). In the recorded video of the performance, Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter slowly fade away into the darkness before the camera repositions to capture the couple opening the theater doors and walking out into the lobby. Spectators in the theater are confronted with the sudden shift in lighting from the controlled setting of the stage to the harsh fluorescent lights of the lobby. As they walk through the lobby, still nude and with the borders of the American continent painted on their bodies, the performance artists force their audiences—ticket-holding individuals in the theater and random spectators in the lobby—to see them and to be seen seeing them. In an intimate display of the human body, spectators must confront the reality that it is not enough to advocate for the visibility of LGBTIQ+ identities from the relative safety of the stage or even the relative safety of the audience, given the collapse of the stage-audience separation as the actors exit the theater. Queer Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists like Tzoc Bucup, Arenas Carter, and their allies must be willing to take risks, even if that means laying bare their vulnerabilities, to make meaningful steps toward the acceptance of nonheteronormative Indigenous identities in their communities across Abiayala. With the metatheatrical breaking of the fourth wall in The Reestablishment of Abya Yala, the interpolation of the spectators in the performance productively complicates the Maya concept of the cha’anil. As Llanes Ortiz explains, while the concept of the cha’anil can be understood as a performance from the Yucatec Maya frame of reference, the two concepts are not exactly equivalent because cha’anil does not require the active, physical participation of its spectators:

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No todo tipo de performance califica como cha’anil. Es el caso del ch’a’a cháak (petición de lluvia), el wajikool (comida de la milpa) o el jets’ lu’um (apaciguamiento de la tierra), ya que estos rituales demandan no solamente ser un espectador, sino fundamentalmente ser un participante. Cha’antbil (“gustar de”, ser espectador) requiere sólamente de los ojos y los oídos, sin que el sujeto actúe. Not every type of performance qualifies as cha’anil. This is the case of the ch’a’a cháak (request for rain), the wajikool (food of the cornfield) or the jets’ lu’um (appeasement of the land), since these rituals demand not only a spectator, but fundamentally being a participant. Cha’antbil (“like,” be a spectator) requires only the eyes and ears, without the subject acting. (30) Rather than discount The Reestablishment of Abya Yala as an example of cha’anil, I argue for a broader conception of the ways in which spectators may participate in the cha’anil, particularly in light of Llanes Ortiz’s calls to use the cha’anil for social activism. At the end of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala, following this intimate display between Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter, spectators are left to reflect on what actions or steps they will take. A “What happens next?” moment of reckoning occurs for the audience, including LGBTIQ+ peoples and their allies. I identify this as significant for the cha’anil because it is a moment when the artists ask, if not require, audience members to become active, responsive participants, even though their participation demands no outward movement or vocalization in the moment. Similarly, Llanes Ortiz argues that people who do not speak the Indigenous languages of linguistic revitalization projects can potentially promote these projects. For the Yucatec anthropologist, the cha’anil supplies a form of participation that is widely accessible, because the activist engagement the cha’anil fosters can happen without the necessity for linguistic understanding. By extension, you do not have to identify as LGBTIQ + to be able to contribute to meaningful social change. Analyzing The Reestablishment of Abya Yala through the non-Western concept of cha’anil points to allyship as a critical product of this kind of artistic activism. This methodological approach of analyzing this performance through/as the concept of cha’anil further promotes a collective pan-Indigenous activism. It is this hemispheric, transnational call to action from which the very concept of Abiayala was first conceived.

Mediated audience participation As I have noted, the spectators seated in the auditorium are not the only audience to be accounted for in The Reestablishment of Abya Yala. For a variety of reasons, some people did not watch the performance live in the theater but, rather, saw the recorded version available after the event on NYU’s HIVDL.

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As Kirsten Nigro noted in her essay from 1987, issues of access have long been an obstacle to scholars working in Latin American theater and performance studies. Though the technology has changed over the years, barriers to access remain decades later. Nigro laments the situation of a particular species of “armchair” reader based in North American universities; she explains that “too many of us are deprived of the ultimate … experience, as we have few opportunities to experience in performance the printed play that we study” (103). In the case of Tzoc Bucup’s performance art, I personally have not had the opportunity to experience much of his work live. However, because of the efforts of the Hemispheric Institute, online audiences are able to access a recording of the Chile performance online. Although the recorded version of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala has the potential to reach larger numbers of people by being housed online in the HIVDL, at the same time this access may diminish the collective aspect of the performance because viewers often observe performances through media individually. In his conceptualization of technologically mediated oral poetry, Paul Zumthor recognizes this dynamic when he states, “Records, tape recorders, cassettes and radio, the auditory mediats tend to eliminate, along with vision, the collective dimension of reception. Then again, individually, they reach an unlimited number of listeners” (190). Zumthor restricts his commentary to audio media, but we can also extend it to online videos, like those housed in the HIVDL. Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter’s performance of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala is accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. Large numbers of people, then, could potentially view the video online, albeit individually at their personal computers. How, then, does the remediated modality of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala affect the potential for these audiences to socially engage with the LGBTIQ+ content in the performance? On the one hand, online audiences do not confront that collective moment of reckoning in the same way as the live theater audience directly following the performance. Instead of being tasked with the decision of whether to stand up and physically follow the actors out of the building, the people operating the cameras make that decision for us online viewers, since we are obligated to follow Tzoc Bucup and Arenas Carter out into the lobby as the video progresses. On the other hand, the capturing of a recording of the live performance creates a version of the performance art that is permanently available, so future audiences are able to view and engage with the content. Though the live performance of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala was recorded in 2016 and subsequently uploaded to the HIVDL, the video is permanently available as long as its link is active. It is possible for that unique link to be circulated online—and remediated across digital platforms—in a variety of ways. For example, in celebration of Pride Month, Tzoc Bucup shared the link to The Reestablishment of Abya Yala on Facebook in a public post on June 28, 2020. Though all online

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content ultimately runs the risk of becoming unavailable—links can be broken, content removed, and so forth—its relative permanence online in comparison to the ephemerality of the live performance gives it a more prolonged ability to engage and attract potential advocates and allies. This, then, allows for access to and collaboration across all of Abiayala for those who have Internet access, which in some ways furthers the pan-Indigenous activist call. In the specific case of Guatemala, even if there is not a stable Internet connection in the home, more and more people have high-speed Internet access through their smartphones. Working through the digital platform to make this performance available to other marginalized, potentially isolated LGBTIQ+-identified people is a key form of social justice activism in terms of supporting the increasingly victimized LGBTIQ+ communities across Abiayala. To further promote this call to action, I would be remiss if I did not pause to reflect on the differences in interactivity between Facebook and the HIDVL. Namely, while NYU’s platform does not provide users with a way to interact with the media, Facebook’s platform does. Though Facebook complicates notions of access because Manuel Tzoc Bucup must confirm you as a “friend” in order to give you access to his profile, once his friend, a Facebook user is able to view Tzoc Bucup’s profile information, photos, and videos. One is also able to react to the various components of the account by clicking on the “like” icon to express a range of responses through emoticons, as well as by publishing comments on photos, videos, links, and status updates, including but not limited to the performance of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala that Tzoc Bucup shared in June 2020. In this way, audiences who access the performance exclusively through Facebook also have an opportunity to experience their own moment of reckoning following the performance, albeit in a mediated format, given the digital modality. In the moment that Tzoc Bucup shared the video on Facebook, he implicitly asked his audience of Facebook friends to interact with the media, either through emoticon “likes” or published comments. He implored them to take a step beyond being passive observers of the video by asking them to make a public expression of their reaction to the performance. Similar to the live audience members who must determine how they will respond to the actors’ breaking the illusory fourth wall and walking through the theater, Tzoc Bucup urges his Facebook audiences to reflect on how they will respond to the performance. Though it is well-known that not all Facebook users interact with all content that comes their way, to date Tzoc Bucup’s post featuring the video of The Reestablishment of Abya Yala has been liked thirty times, loved thirty-seven times, and received the “care” emoticon once.5 While the post currently has no comments, it also has been shared by another user, furthering its visibility—and opportunities for audience interaction—in the social media platform.

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Conclusion Beyond politics, advances for LGBTIQ+ Guatemalans have also occurred through cultural initiatives that have provided a symbolic space to discuss issues of gender and sexuality. For example, the Festival Internacional de Cine y Comunicación de los Pueblos Indígenas/Originarios (International Festival of Film and Communication of Indigenous Peoples), or FICMAYAB’— Mayab’ referring to the greater Maya territory extending from Mexico to Nicaragua—sponsored a session on issues of gender and sexuality on October 10, 2018. Hosted at the Cine Lux in Guatemala City, this special session featured a roundtable discussion including Manuel Tzoc Bucup and Miriam Carolina Chub, a transgender Maya activist originally from Senahú, Alta Verapaz. Like many LGBTIQ+ Maya, Chub abandoned her home in the countryside when she was a young adolescent and migrated to the capital (“Soy una mujer”), where historically nonheteronormative identities have been more accepted. There are undoubtedly people who identify as nonheteronormative in Guatemala’s rural aldeas (towns), but many are unable to be out for fear of public ridicule or even physical violence. To be clear, the capital is certainly not free of discrimination and is not completely safe for LGBTIQ+ Guatemalans either—it is only less risky. While significant steps have been made toward inclusion and diversity in Guatemala, it remains that most examples of progress have been limited to Guatemala City. Despite this activism, Guatemala remains one of the deadliest countries in Abiayala for LGBTIQ+ Indigenous peoples, even in the capital city (Amnesty International 2017). There is still much work to be done for activists like Tzoc Bucup to make both Guatemala City and the countryside, where the majority of the nation’s Indigenous population resides, a safe place for LGBTIQ+ Maya. In this context, then, perhaps one of the most revolutionary results of Tzoc Bucup’s work is his public display of his nonheteronormative sexuality as an openly queer Indigenous author in Guatemala. Events at the 2019 Feria Internacional del Libro en Guatemala/Runimaq’ij ri Wuj chi Iximulew (FILGUA, or International Book Fair of Guatemala) spoke to the limited increase in visibility for LGBTIQ+ issues. For example, at a roundtable featuring Tzoc Bucup and other prominent Guatemalan LGBTIQ+ authors, several participants agreed it was surprising that Tzoc Bucup was still alive. These comments were not made in jest or with any exaggeration. Given the extremely high levels of gendered violence in Guatemala, it really is incredible, as one participant described, that Tzoc Bucup has not fallen victim to the violence. In many ways, Tzoc Bucup’s continued existence is an act of resistance in and of itself. His out nonheteronormative identity—as well as the risks taken by Arenas Carter and other artists—has made space for a younger generation of Guatemalan LGBTIQ+ authors and artists to publish and gain visibility for their cultural production. The shared dialogue during the two scheduled events and literary panels at FILGUA 2019, in addition to the publication of Guatemala’s first LGBTIQ+ literary anthology, Anatomías del deseo negado

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(Anatomy of Denied Desire, 2018), were evidence of the growing visibility and awareness of LGBTIQ+ initiatives in Guatemalan literary circles. The courage of these LGBTIQ+ authors and artists is crucial as they work to make Guatemala more accepting of its nonheteronormative citizens, because, as Tzoc Bucup’s Facebook post quoted at the beginning of this essay reminds us, “Hay demasiados obstáculos, prejuicios, odios, autoodios que trabajar” (There are too many obstacles, prejudices, hatreds, self-hatreds to work against).

Notes 1 All translations are my own, unless stated otherwise. 2 In this essay, I will use the expression “LGBTIQ+,” as that is the expression that Manuel Tzoc Bucup uses in his work to self-identify and to describe the social initiatives to advance nonheteronormative subjectivities within Guatemala. Similarly, most queer activists in Guatemala also use this acronym. Tzoc Bucup defines “LGBTIQ” in the following way: En años recientes las iniciales LGBTIQ se han utilizado para denominar de forma inclusiva a todos los individuos y a las comunidades que se identifican como lesbianas, gays, bisexuales o transgénero o aquellos/as que tienen dudas acerca de su sexualidad y/o identidad de género. No existe una forma única de ordenar las letras (GLBT, por ejemplo), algunas personas agregan letras adicionales, incluyendo, por ejemplo, “I” de intersexo (antes conocido como hermafrodismo), “Q” de queer (“raro” en inglés) o de questioning, y “A” de aliados que no son LGBT pero que los/las apoyan (LGBTQIA). In recent years, the initials LGBTIQ have been used to refer to all individuals and communities that identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender or those who have doubts about their sexuality and/or gender identity. There is no unique way to sort the letters (GLBT, for example), some people add additional letters, including, for example, intersex “I” (formerly known as hermaphrodism), queer “Q” (“weird” in English) or questioning, and “A” for allies who are not LGBT but who support them (LGBTQIA). (Anatomías 2) 3 “Abiayala” or “Abya Yala” is an expression from the Guna (Kuna) Indigenous language in Panama, which refers to the Americas in their totality. 4 Another notable example can be found in Steven Salaita’s use of the term “inter/ nationalism” to describe the similarities in decolonial thought processes and methodologies in his comparative study on Native American and Palestinian social activism (ix–x). 5 Although there are increased opportunities to actively engage in cultural production online, not all audience members do so. According to Jonathan Dovey and Martin Lister, specialists in digital culture research, “Web business builds on the 98 percent: 2 percent rule—98 percent of traffic will pass through the site whilst only 2 percent will stay and get involved in the social network or other ‘producerly’ activities” (142).

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Bibliography Allen, Chadwick. Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies. Indigenous Americas. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. Amnesty International. Americas: ‘No Safe Place’: Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans Seeking Asylum in Mexico Based on their Sexual Orientation and/or Gender Identity. November 27, 2017. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ amr01/7258/2017/en/%20/. Arenas Carter, Rodrigo, and Manuel Tzoc Bucup. The Reestablishment of Abya Yala. Video of performance at Encuentro eXcéntrico: Disidencia, Soberanías, Performance, Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, July 17–23, 2016, Santiago, Chile. http://archive.hemisphericinstitute.org/excentrico/1330/thereestablishment-of-abya-yala/. Arias, Arturo, Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, and Emilio del Valle Escalante. “Literaturas de Abya Yala.” LASA Forum 43, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 7–10. Arias, Arturo. Recovering Lost Footprints: Contemporary Maya Narratives. Vol. 1. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. Benson, Peter, Kedron Thomas, and Edward Fischer. “Guatemala’s New Violence as Structural Violence: Notes from the Highlands.” In Securing the City: Neoliberalism, Space, and Insecurity in Postwar Guatemala, edited by Kevin Lewis O’Neill and Kedron Thomas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011, 127–45. Burdette, Hannah. Revealing Rebellion in Abiayala: The Insurgent Poetics of Contemporary Indigenous Literature. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Chacón, Gloria E. Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. “Ch’aaweem.” Diccionario K’iche’, compiled by Pedro Florentino Ajpacajá Túm, et al. Guatemala City: Proyecto Lingüístico Francisco Marroquín, Fundación Cholsamaj, 1996. Conaway, Janelle. “Domestic Violence and Justice in Guatemala.” Américas 62, no. 5 (2010): 46–48. Dovey, Jonathan, and Martin Lister. “Straw Men or Cyborgs?” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 1, no. 1 (2009): 129–45. Driskill, Qwo-Li, Scott Lauria Morgensen, Brian Joseph Gilley, and Chris Finley, eds. Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature. First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011. Goldin, Liliana, and Brenda Rosenbaum. “Everyday Violence of Exclusion: Women in Precarious Neighborhoods of Guatemala City.” In Mayas in Postwar Guatemala: Harvest of Violence Revisited, edited by Walter Little and Timothy Smith. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009, 67–83. Justice, Daniel Heath. “Currents of Trans/national Criticism in Indigenous Literary Studies.” American Indian Quarterly. Special issue, American Indian Studies Today 35, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 334–52. Justice, Daniel Heath, and James H. Cox. “Queering Native Literature, Indigenizing Queer Theory.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, series 2, vol. 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): xiii–xiv.

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Llanes Ortiz, Genner. “Yaan muuk’ ich cha’anil/El potencial de Cha’anil: Un concepto maya para la revitalización lingüística.” Ichan Teolotl/La Casa del Tecolote 26, no. 301 (2015): 28–30. McAllister, Carlota, and Diane Nelson, eds. War by Other Means: Aftermath in Post-Genocide Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013. Morales Trujillo, Hilda. “Feminicide and Sexual Violence in Guatemala.” In Terrorizing Women: Feminicide in the Americas, edited by Rosa-Linda Fregoso and Cynthia Bejarano. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 127–37. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Musalo, Karen, and Blaine Bookey. “Crimes without Punishment: An Update on Violence against Women and Impunity in Guatemala.” Hastings Race and Poverty Law Journal 10 (2013): 265–92. Nelson, Diane. Reckoning: The Ends of War in Guatemala. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Nigro, Kirsten. “On Reading and Responding to (Latin American) Playtexts.” Gestos 2, no. 4 (November 1987): 101–13. Salaita, Steven. Inter/nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Sigal, Pete. From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Smith, Timothy, and Thomas Offit. “Confronting Violence in Postwar Guatemala: An Introduction.” Journal of Latin American Anthropology 15, no. 1 (2010): 1–15. “Soy una mujer transexual, Indígena.” FICMAYAB’: Festival Internacional de Cine y Comunicación de los Pueblos Indígenas/Originarios, October 2018. https://www.ficmayab.org/noticias/152-soy-una-mujer-transexual-indigena?fbclid= IwAR07DXx5hXIsMYL69GvLM_55i9ug2fGnXc5dpMJ7qdcLY- ALUOAbb4uVImQ. Stone, Andrea J. Images from the Underworld: Naj Tunich and the Tradition of Maya Cave Painting. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Tzoc Bucup, Manuel. Cuerpos tecnológicos. Queerpoéticas, Guatemala City, 2015. Tzoc Bucup, Manuel. Gay(o). Guatemala City: Ediciones La Maleta Ilegal, 2015. Tzoc Bucup, Manuel. Piel. Guatemala City: Street performance, 2016. Tzoc Bucup, Manuel, ed. Anatomías del deseo negado: Antología LGBTIQ+. Guatemala City: e/X, 2018. Worley, Paul M., and Rita M. Palacios. Unwriting Maya Literature: Ts’íib as Recorded Knowledge. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019. Zumthor, Paul. Oral Poetry: An Introduction. Translated by Kathryn Murphy-Judy. Theory and History of Literature 70. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

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Music, poetry, and Créolité in the songs of Carole Demesmin, singer, troubadour, and activist Cécile Accilien Kennesaw State University

Sometimes referred to as “Mother of Haiti,” Carole Demesmin is a pillar when it comes to her passion to preserve Haitian culture and Haiti’s legacy through her music and artistic performance. This is her worldview: “My belief is in what we call eternity. In mythology, for Black people what we call eternity is not ‘go and die and live in heaven.’ Eternity is the blood my mother and grandmother gave to me. We reproduce ourselves in another generation with the same soul, the same love we carry.” In Haiti, music and musical performances are an important component of cultural life. From the rhythmic sounds of konpa, a dance music with African and European roots, and the chanting voices of merchants selling their goods in the open-air markets to the blaring horns of the tap taps and countless radio stations broadcasting music or news, sound and music permeate the Haitian landscape. Melodious and intense rhythms of drums from the hills and mountains form Haiti’s rich musical legacy and are directly linked to its history. Haitian music, like the Creole language, has a mixed cultural heritage with elements inherited from the Taino Indians, Hispaniola’s first inhabitants; the Spanish and French colonizers; and the enslaved Africans who were captured and brought by force via the Atlantic slave trade. This heritage also includes two centuries of the marginalization of women, despite the fact that politicians in their discourse proclaimed that they were the backbone of Haitian society. Because of Haiti’s highly patriarchal society, women were prevented from being fully involved in certain types of activism, and their roles in the political sphere were very limited. One woman who has contributed to Haiti’s rethinking of the role of women through her performance is the singer and activist Carole Demesmin. The idea of performance and how it has changed Haiti is one that must be contextualized historically during the period of the Haitian Revolution, when enslaved Africans decided to take up their weapons. The famous Vodou ceremony held in August 1791 in Bois Caïman, wherein the enslaved people took an oath to be free or die, is at the heart of the foundation of freedom for Haitians. This ceremony is probably one of the most important performances that have shaped Haiti’s history and essence as a country. Although this Vodou ceremony was presided over by a woman, a Vodou priestess or manbo by the name of DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-7

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Cécile Fatiman, women are often forgotten as having played a fundamental role in Haiti’s history and birth as a nation. Through her music and her own life, Demesmin affirms the role of women in Haiti’s culture. Although she has been living in the United States for decades, Haiti lives within her. She is at once a manbo, singer, actress, nurse, therapist, and environmental activist. She is a staunch defender of the Vodou religion and considers it a way of life for Haitians and a means by which they deal with the adversities and agonies they often face. This belief is inflected in her own performance. Demesmin performs history and allows a space for women to have their own historical narratives. She changes history by giving voices to women heroines, such as Défilée, Catherine Flon, and Marie-Jeanne Lamartinière, who are not placed at the center of Haitian history. In this chapter, I analyze some songs of Demesmin and the ways in which, through her activism and performance, she creates a space for women and inserts their voices into Haiti’s history. This must be understood in the context of both the role of language (Haitian Creole) and the connection between music and poetry in Demesmin’s songs and performance. Like music, poetry is an important form of artistic expression in Haitian culture, whether standing alone or embedded in songs. Throughout Haitian history, poets and musicians have used their talent to reflect and describe their conditions and that of their environment, to resist the social and political status quo, and to fight oppressive regimes. For instance, the poet Feliks Moriso Lewa (Félix Morisseau-Leroy) is among the first scholars to write in Haitian Creole. His goal was to give a voice to Haitians through the promotion of the Creole language.1 Similarly, the renowned journalist and activist Jean Dominique was one of the first persons to broadcast the news in Creole, providing equal access to Haitians of all classes. Like Moriso Lewa and Dominique, Demesmin is a singer and activist who uses her songs to empower Haitians, especially women, from all walks of life. This chapter analyzes three poem-songs, two of them written by Demesmin and the other, by poet Jean-Claude Martineau. They are from the albums Lawouze and Maroulé and are sung in Creole. They demonstrate Demesmin’s place as a poet-troubadour and the crucial role she plays in contemporary Haitian culture, specifically the ways her music embodies the notions of creoleness and creolization. First, I want to clarify what I am referring to when I use the terms Creoleness (Créolité in French) and creolization. I use the term creolization in this context to refer to the process or ways by which the various cultures (Native American, Spanish, French, and African) found in Haiti today were blended to become a new culture. More generally, I employ the notion of Creoleness or Créolité to refer to the literary, intellectual, and cultural movement led by Martinican writers Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau. Their manifesto Éloge de la Créolité/In Praise of Creoleness puts forth the idea that the French Caribbean islands must

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embrace their diversity at all levels: linguistic, racial, and cultural. Furthermore, they underline the close link between Creoleness and Caribbeanness. “Neither Europeans, nor Africans, nor Asians, we proclaim ourselves Creole. This will be for us an interior attitude––better, a vigilance, or even better, a sort of mental envelope in the idle of which our world will be built in full consciousness of the outer world.”2 Being Creole involves the recognition of these various components of their identity and the fact that they all mesh together. One identity does not exist without another. They also underscore that “we cannot reach Caribbeanness without interior vision. And interior vision is nothing without the unconditional acceptance of our Creoleness. We declare ourselves Creoles. We declare that Creoleness is the cement of our culture and that it ought to rule the foundations of our Caribbeanness.”3 Creolization is parallel to Édouard Glissant’s notion of “the poetics of Relations, in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”4 The Créolité movement came about in the 1980s mainly because the thinkers believed that the previous movements of négritude and antillanité did not adequately reflect the reality of the French Caribbean. Négritude was a cultural, literary, and intellectual movement developed primarily by Francophone intellectual thinkers Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas. Its main goal was to create awareness of French imperialism, challenge the representation of blackness, and generate race consciousness and pride within people of African descent in Africa and the diaspora. The antillanité movement arose a few decades later with Édouard Glissant proposing to go beyond négritude to focus on a Caribbean identity that emerges from different cultures and racial groups while taking into account the historical and ethnic diversity of the Caribbean. While centering on the cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity of the Antilles and especially the French Caribbean, the Créolité movement seeks to legitimize a new Caribbean diversity that embraces the various races and the Creole language. Like négritude and antillanité, it also has its shortcoming. Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter to examine in detail some of the problems and limitations of Créolité, I will simply mention the paradox of writing in French, the colonizer’s language, to promote the Creole language.5 Nevertheless, the Créolité manifesto was an epistemological irruption on the Caribbean literary and cultural scene. By reappropriating the term Creole, the tenants of the movement are decolonizing it and following Césaire’s footsteps when he claimed the word nègre and turned it into négritude, one of the most important literary, cultural, philosophical, and political movements of the twentieth century. However, one can argue that the Creolists’ choice to write in French, while perhaps practical, is also noteworthy. Language is never neutral. As the Chicana tejana lesbian feminist poet Gloria Anzaldúa states in Borderlands/La Frontera, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity––I am my

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language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself.”6 This linguistic pride is encompassed in the notion of Créolité as “an annihilation of false universality, of monolinguism and of purity.”7 The perception of the purity of a language or the superiority of one over another is charged with historical and erroneous nuances that aim at restricting a particular language or culture. It goes against the idea of contact and interaction—precisely the notions that the Créolité movement stresses. I argue that Demesmin’s artistic performance challenges and erases the notion of monolinguism and purity. Her choice to sing in Creole instead of French valorizes the Creole language and brings forth various elements of Haitian culture that have been marginalized in the past. As mentioned before, at the heart of the Creoleness movement lies the idea of the exchange and mixture of the various cultures that came into contact in different spaces where there was colonization, including Haiti. In that regard, Demesmin is a Creole singer who uses the process of creolization and Creoleness both culturally and linguistically to represent Haiti and Haitian culture in her songs. She legitimizes the Creole language and creolized Haitian culture in order to depict Haitian reality. Creolization has always been a part of Haiti’s history and culture. The very fact that the enslaved people who fought for their independence refuted Christianity, the colonizers’ religion, and upon their independence in 1804 renamed Saint Domingue “Haiti” (Ayiti in Creole), a Taino word meaning “land of mountains,” was in and of itself an act of creolization and repossession. However, throughout Haiti’s history, the French language has been used as a powerful tool of domination to maintain the status quo and keep the majority of Haitians from actively participating in their country’s development.

Haitian Creole, development, and Haitian identity Creole is a revolutionary language in many aspects. For decades, it was often associated with the countryside, illeteracy and peasants. However, in the past three to four decades, this attitude has evolved. A Kreyòl constitution was ratified in 1987, the first national document in the language of the majority of Haitians. Since 2014 there is an official Haitian Creole Academy (Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen), whose objectives include promoting Haitian Creole and standardizing it.8 The importance of Creole in Haiti’s development at all levels is crucial. Having full integration of the Creole language is a way to allow all citizens, whether from urban or rural areas, whether rich or poor, to participate equally and have full access to and voice in Haiti’s decision-making process. Haiti has a long history of using the French language to empower the elite class and exclude the masses. Demesmin had been singing in Creole even before it was recognized as an official language (along with French) following the signing of the 1987 constitution under President Jean-Bertrand

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Aristide. The issue of language in Haiti permeates every aspect of life and is at the core of development. Scholars such as Yves Dejean, Flore Zéphir and Michel DeGraff have written extensively on the complexity of Haitian Creole in Haiti as well as the correlation between language use, education, and development. Arthur K. Spears and Carole M. Berotte Joseph, in the edited volume The Haitian Creole Language, analyze Creole from a historical, social, cultural, and educational context.9 The collection also attests to Haiti’s rich Creole literary tradition.10 Demesmin is part of a long line of activists who believe in the fundamental place of Haitian Creole in Haiti’s culture. She is a musical icon who works effortlessly to represent Haitian culture positively. Her songs are the medium through which she demonstrates her activism. As all Haitians generally understand her songs, in which she depicts a Haiti filled with hope, self-governance, and sustainability, the Haitian Creole language becomes the battlefield wherein she fights for a positive representation of Haitian culture. Another leading artist who has tirelessly fought to protect the Creole language is the activist Jan Mapou (Jean-Marie Willer Denis), owner of Libreri Mapou, a library and cultural center located in Little Haiti in the heart of Miami’s Haitian community. In 1965 he was one of the founders of the Mouvman Kreyòl Ayisyen (the Haitian Creole Movement). Its primary objective was to promote and support the Creole language as well as to create materials in Creole. Since language and culture are always interconnected, this movement became one that advocates the use of the Creole language and defends Creole culture. From this movement emerged a Haitian poetic form known as wongòl. It is a form that has three or four pye (feet) or lines. “It goes ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta/ta-ta-ta-ta-ta/ta-ta-ta-ta-ta- paw. You say three lines, and the fourth one carries a powerful message. And then the choir will sing a folkloric song called ‘wongòl.’ … This style of ‘pwezi andaki’ (coded poetry) was created by … poet[s] Raoul Denis and … Ti Tonton (Joe Tony), both members of Lanbi Klib.”11 The Haitian Creole Movement worked with several other organizations, such as Étoile Caraïbes, the Gombo Club, and Karako Bleu, to promote Haitian culture. One of the results of this advocacy was the embracing of Haitian folk cultural forms, such as dance and theater, as well as the Vodou religion. Given the low literacy rate in Haiti, music, like oral poetry, is a critical political tool. Groups such as Boukman Eksperyans, Boukan Ginen, Les Frères Dejean, and Les Frères Parents, as well as individuals such as Desmesmin, Manno Charlemagne, and Emeline Michel, utilize their music to raise political consciousness. Popular music in many ways also settles the Creole/French polemic, since the majority of popular music such as the music played during carnival, is in Creole. At times music and poetry are interconnected, and the poet becomes a troubadour, a modern-day griot, blending the two forms. Music’s accessibility in most cultures, but particularly in a country with a high rate of illiteracy, often makes the troubadour especially deft at reaching a large number of people.

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Carole Demesmin: poet-singer Demesmin is a poet-singer who sometimes composes her own poem-songs highlighting issues ranging from exile to memory and history. For more than four decades , she has been a strong voice in Haitian music. A singer, actress, and social activist, she is considered by many Haitians to be one of the greatest contemporary performers of Haitian music. Many of her songs are written by the Haitian historian, playwright, poet, and songwriter Jean-Claude Martineau. Martineau (also known by the name of Koralen) is an important figure in Haitian politics and culture. He served as Jean Bertrand Aristide’s official spokesperson during the 1991 coup d’état, when the former president was living in exile in the United States. In his article “The Other Occupation: The Haitian Version of Apartheid,” Martineau remarks, “Although there are about two dozen countries poorer than Haiti, she has become, by default, the poverty champion of the world. … A specific role has been assigned to Haiti by the West. … But Haiti has written a different script for herself.”12 Through their songs, working in tandem, the two activists are rewriting Haiti’s script to portray it as a determined and resilient nation. Demesmin sings mostly in Creole and incorporates folklore into her lyrics. Choosing to sing in Creole, the language spoken by the majority of Haitians, is a political and cultural statement. This language choice is important because Creole is the only language the greater number of Haitians living in Haiti speak fluently. Ensuring her audience understands her songs is a way for Desmesmin to allow everyone to take part in the message she is diffusing. It is also a way to sensitize people and bring awareness to issues such as the erasure of women in Haitian history and the necessity for all Haitians to actively participate in the country’s political governance. Demesmin also uses traditional folkloric dances in her performances, such as the conga rhythm sometimes performed during Vodou ceremonies. This is yet another way for her to legitimize the Vodou religion and acknowledge it as a fundamental part of Haitian culture. Haitian culture blossoms through her music. In developing her craft, Demesmin continues a tradition of blending or pairing poetry and music. One of the most famous Haitian song-poems, “Choukoun” (“Choucoune” in French), is a nineteenth-century song set to music by the American composer Michel Mauléart Monton, with lyrics from an 1896 poem by the Haitian poet Oswald Durand. According to popular belief, Durand wrote the poem while he was jailed in Cap-Haïtien for criticizing political leaders. Durand immortalized the beauty of a woman whose “eyes are bright like a candle, teeth are white like milk, and breasts stand firm.”13 The song became very popular in several versions, the most popular of which is a calypso one known as “Yellow Bird.” It was recorded in 1952 by the Cuban singer Celia Cruz; it was also performed by musicians such as Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, the Mills Brothers, and Lawrence Welk.14 “Choukoun” is as well-known as one of Haiti’s national anthems, “Ayiti Cheri.”

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Poetry and music Poetry and music are two different forms that often crisscross and inform each other. In ancient Greece, it was common practice for poets to play musical instruments, such as the lyre, as they declaimed poetry. While the Greek word aoidos refers to the poet as a “singer,” the word poietes describes her or him as a “maker” or “composer.” In his well-known collection of articles “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound states, “It is my personal belief that true economy lies in making the tune first. We all of us compose verse to some sort of a tune, and if the ‘song’ is to be sung we may as well compose to a musician’s tune straight away. Yet, no musician comes to one with a melody, rather he comes wishing to set our words to music.”15 Clearly, the idea of poets influenced and inspired by musicians and vice versa is common. Many nineteenth-century French poets, including Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, were inspired by the music of the German composer Richard Wagner. One of Mallarmé’s most famous poems, “L’après-midi d’un faune”16 (Afternoon of a Faun) (1865), inspired Claude Debussy’s musical tone poem of the same title. It was also illustrated by the impressionist painter Édouard Manet. Other nineteenth-century French symbolist poets, such as Paul Verlaine, prescribed the idea that all art should aspire to the condition of music. Verlaine’s well-known poem “Art poétique” states, “De la musique avant toute chose” (Music before everything else); Verlaine believed that the poet should be inspired by music and that his or her poetry should be musical. Likewise, for centuries throughout the African continent, griots and griottes have served as musician-poets. The term griot has various definitions, among them “poet,” “praise singer,” “oral historian,” and “musician.” African griots were also court musicians singing the praises of kings and usually performing with a kora, a lute-like instrument. Their words and music sometimes had a symbiotic and harmonious connection.

Carole Demesmin: poet, griotte, and cultural marker Demesmin is a Creole griotte who sings Haiti’s praises and inspires Haitians to actively participate in their country’s development. With the proliferation of NGOs and various other stakeholders “helping” Haitians in their quest for political, economic, and social development,17 especially after the 2010 earthquake, Demesmin’s poem-songs are even more relevant today. The poet René Philoctète, inspired by Demesmin’s music, pays tribute to her talent with the following words: When generations have grown, it is through stories that they will read Carole Demesmin again, the voice that sings on the Agouey waters and that joins its vastness with men’s simple actions … in a language and an

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intonation of African Pythic. History remains dazzled. She is also sought after as a symbol of national virtues. … Highly motivated ideally and ethically, the voice that carries the message brings you into a political aura. And there you are the carriers of popular protests. Then art creates the dream. In a tangle of rhythms that are colors, volumes, shapes, even perfumes, where the negro drum accentuates the European violin, or jazz emphasizes the Vodou rara, or where fantasy banters with power, the voice invites us to dream of happiness, this state of free mobility. … Art must meet the requirements that lead to beauty, that is to say, to the value, to memory. Carole Demesmin does not understand her calling any other way. In fact, what more can one ask of a voice that convinces you that it has heard at once bondage and revolution?18 For Philotectète, Demesmin’s voice serves as an agent of change. Through her songs, she brings awareness of the social and political issues of the country and tries to rally all Haitians, from all walks of life, to become engaged citizens in the Sartrian sense of the term. Demesmin’s artistic calling is to serve as a guardian of memory, to preserve Haiti’s tumultuous history and stories for the present and future generations. Drawing from the elaborate definition of griotte proposed by Irène D’Almeida in A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women’s Poetry in Francophone Africa, I propose that Demesmin is a modern poète-griotte. D’Almeida defines a griotte as “a poet and often musician trained in the art of eloquence…, an individual entrusted with the memorization, recitation, and teaching of oral history from one generation to the next…, a professional singer of praise and criticism, a social commentator.”19 Demesmin chooses poem-songs that put forward an ideal for Haiti that consists of stability, pride, and memories to inspire future generations to work continuously toward a brighter and better country. She not only sings about the past but also envisions a transformative Haiti where the people will have agency in the creation of a new, stronger nation. The poem-song “Tounen Lakay” (Return Home)20 brings forth that vision. “Tounen Lakay” describes the necessity of a collective return home while also elaborating that each individual must proactively participate in the building of the country, starting with the singer herself:

I will go see where my people are I will speak and sing Creole songs I will beat the drums until the sun rises Then she provides a prescription for everyone to follow once they return home: work together, take an active role in Haiti’s rebuilding, and not act like tourists, who are passersby. The ongoing refrain “Let us work together

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in order to make our country beautiful” is the leitmotif of the poem and brings to mind a common Haitian Creole proverb, “Anpil men, chay pa lou” (Many hands, the load is not heavy). For Demesmin, it is imperative that each person do her or his part and take responsibility for the country. When she reminds people to return home not “as tourists,” she alludes to some Haitians in the diaspora who return home to show off to those who never left Haiti. Although she articulates a list of actions that the listener should not do upon return in order not to hinder the collective work necessary to move forward, she prescribes more than she criticizes by insisting that Haitians in Haiti and the diaspora consistently work together. The poem-song also refers to the continuing brain drain that has taken place in Haiti over the course of the last five decades and that prevents the country from achieving stable development. The song conveys the message of reappropriating the country and creating one’s own destiny. As the diasporic Haitians return with a collective consciousness to contribute, the Haitians who are living in Haiti will be more likely to stay and not idealize lòt bò (literally, “the other side”), a term used to speak of the United States, Canada, France, or the other Caribbean islands and more recently Latin American countries such as Brazil, Chile and Mexico where Haitians migrate; they will not see leaving Haiti as the only viable alternative to their daily struggle. Lòt bò also brings forth the notions of exile, immigration, death, dying, and search for identity. In the Vodou tradition, lòt bò designates the connection between life and death: “As the land and sea define each other at the shore, so life and death define each other by exclusion.”21 The use of the present and future in the poem-song shows the urgency of this return. In the first stanza, Demesmin demystifies the idea that living in a foreign land—lòt bò, on the other side—is always better than living in Haiti. She prescribes what the return could mean and some of the advantages that it will bring: people will work together, communicate in their own language, and have access to their own culture. “Na va pale langaj na chante/Na bat tanbou jouk solèy leve” (We will speak and sing in Creole/We will play the drums until the sun rises). The second stanza highlights what the people at home will expect from those who return: they should not just sit around waiting nor plan to come to loot the country’s resources; rather, they should be working to advance the country. She warns many in the diaspora who return only to be part of the reign of political corruption that prevents the country from reaching stability:” Tounen lakay se pa vinn pran pouvwa fè gwo pòtray” (Returning home is not to come, take power, and parade oneself like a big potentate). The third stanza invites everyone to meet and work collaboratively. It also reiterates the idea put forth in the first stanza stressing the notion Lakay se lakay (Home is home). The fourth stanza enumerates the suffering in Haiti, starting with the children and continuing with the countless who have left in search of a better life, a search that sometimes leads to their demise. The song paints an idealized picture of what the return home would look like: there will be togetherness, “mache

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men nan men”; everyone will be happy, “kè kontan”; there will be celebration, “Na bat tanbou jouk soley leve” (We will play the drums until the sun rises). The beating of the drums probably refers to an all-night Vodou ceremony, highlighting the necessity to embrace one’s culture. Because everyone has left home, lakay, the land is not being taken care of. The land is not just the physical land; it also represents the land of the ancestors. In the traditional practice of the Vodou religion, the belief in the connection between the spiritual and the material world is strong, and it is of the utmost importance for the living to continue to communicate with the dead. Not returning home can have dire consequences for families because there isn’t anyone left to feed the spirits. When the link is missing between the living and the dead, it may be hard for the living to have emotional, financial, and psychological stability. Returning home also means belonging. Home is synonymous with language, food, culture. Home means you are not a migrant. Given the ongoing immigration-status challenges for Haitians, many Haitians, like other exiles, are constantly in search of a home. While “Tounen Lakay” emphasizes the importance of rebuilding Haiti, “Fanm D’Ayiti”22 (Haitian Women) pays tribute to the many fanm vanyan (strong women) in the present and from the past who have been keeping the country afloat through their activism, power, and resilience. Written by Demesmin and inspired by traditional Haitian Vodou music, the poem-song is a short one with four main stanzas through which a refrain is woven. The first stanza establishes women as life-givers and life-changers, both literally and metaphorically, and honors the fact that they play a vital role in maintaining the structure of the community. The next stanza lists some of their contributions to Haiti’s history. The third one reminisces about a land in which women were the backbone of their society. The last stanza orders women to stand up like the fighters that they are and reclaim their rights: “In Bwa Kayiman, remember that we were there/During independence O, of course, we were there/ When they were making the flag, it was we who sewed it.” This refrain echoes and accentuates important historical lessons. Demesmin alludes to an imaginary country, “Gelefwe,” in which women ruled and actually helped men, giving them “wings” (of power) and freedom that they didn’t have. This can be interpreted in several ways: it can refer to another era in a faraway country where the Amazon African women went to war and fought to preserve their land, or it can be read as referencing an imagined land where women are working together with men to make life better for everyone. The reference to konbit and Bwa Kayiman are important in the song. Konbit, a Creole term meaning “gathering, collaborating, or cooperating,” usually applies to a group work session in which people from the community come together during harvest time to support and help one another. The main objective of a konbit is for individuals to work together for the betterment of the whole community. Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caïman in French) refers to the site of the Vodou ceremony that took place near Cap-Haïtien in

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1791 that is considered to be one of the most consequential moments in Haiti’s fight for independence. Cécile Fatiman was a manbo who presided alongside Boukman, the ougan or Vodou priest during that ceremony. This was an event that empowered the enslaved people as they made a pact to live free or die for their freedom. Paying homage to Cécile Fatiman, Catherine Flon, Marie-Jeanne Lamartinièrre, the maroon Zabeth, and queen Anacaona, among others, the poem-song is set to a rara rhythm that invites the listener to be a part of this celebration. The events sung about are the core and foundation of Haiti’s history. This poem-song allows Demesmin to rewrite and reclaim history and provide a space to recognize all women who have participated in Haiti’s struggle yet are often silenced and forgotten by the so-called official his-story. For instance, it creates a space for the historical figure of Défilée, the woman who gathered the remains of Haiti’s first president and emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, after he was assassinated in 1806 to make sure that he was given a proper burial. Yet Défilée is mentioned only in passing in Haitian history as “Défilée la Folle” (Défilée the Madwoman) and not as a heroine. Labeling her mad is a way to undermine her role. Likewise, it was Catherine Flon who sewed the first Haitian flag identified as a tangible symbol of liberty. Demesmin places the women in biological, ancestral, and historical capacities. Anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, states: “History, as social process, involves [individuals] in three distinct capacities: 1) as agents, or occupants of structural positions; 2) as actors in constant interface with a context; and 3) as subjects, that is, as voices aware of their vocality.”23 Demesmin inserts the voices of these poto mitan (pillars) who continue to literally and figuratively give life to Haiti, who are guardians of tradition and protectors of culture, yet who are too often downplayed or forgotten. Through her various poem-songs, Demesmin has a tradition of giving voice to the voiceless. For instance, her celebrated song “Lumane Casimir,”24 written and composed by the poet Jean-Claude Martineau, pays homage to Casimir, a Haitian singer from the 1940s, who is sometimes referred to as “the silkcotton tree of Haitian music” (pye mapou mizik ayisyen), meaning an iconic figure in the history of Haitian music. She is believed to have been the first Haitian woman guitarist and is considered one of the most important women musicians in Haiti’s history. During her lifetime, she visited Cuba, the United States (New York), and Canada to represent Haiti and showcase Haitian culture through music. Although she died in her thirties, with her golden nightingale voice she captured much from Haiti’s cultures and left her indelible mark on the Haitian musical scene. Her repertory of songs included the popular “Papa Gede” and “Karolina Karo.” By simply entitling the song “Lumane Casimir,” Martineau and Demesmin reinsert Lumane’s voice and life into official and popular Haitian history.

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In spite of her incredible talent, Casimir’s fame was short-lived, and she became homeless. We do not know the exact details of how she became destitute in spite of her beautiful and extraordinary voice. Maybe she ended up depressed and lacked economic stability, like many great artists who did not have the necessary support for their artistic talent. However, the poem-song does state that a few neighborhood children, her only friends, were the ones who used to feed her. It retraces Casimir’s trajectory, her life, her popularity, and her demise. This lyrical poem-song stresses Casimir’s powerful voice. Her talents and vocal strength were so incredible that when she died even the palm trees stood up to pay her respect and the day was gray because nature was crying at this great loss. Yet the truth is Casimir died in an awful condition: alone and penniless. But Martineau and Demesmin revitalize her spirit and recognize her talents through their beautiful poem-song. The poem-song not only pays tribute to Lumane Casimir’s memory and talent but also places her in the context of an enchanted period of Haiti’s history. One of the main strengths of Demesmin’s poem-songs is their versatility. She appeals to a wide audience in terms of both her style and the pertinent issues raised in her lyrics. Although a legend for decades in Haitian communities in Haiti and the diaspora, she interests the current generation not only because the issues she brings forth are still relevant but also because of the poetic and artistic ways in which she exposes Haiti’s diversity and cultural heritage—be it in terms of religion, folklore, or history. Her poemsongs openly and boldly encompass themes such as political engagement, feminism, and national consciousness. Demesmin’s poetics and engagement as a singer are unfaltering. She is exploring Haiti’s rich and complex history and linking it to current events, arguing through her songs that in order to move forward it is important to understand the past. By honoring the past heroines and heroes of Haitian history, she is challenging the current generation to follow the examples of those people who struggled to free Haiti and to work toward new independence (political, economic, cultural) in contemporary Haiti. Her songs, which are poems written by her and Jean-Claude Martineau, are examples of oraliture, a mix of history (official with a big H) and story. It is this mélange that has created the Créolité in her songs. Orality is a fundamental part of Haiti’s history and culture. At times, Demesmin uses the traditional call and response structure (“Krik? Krak!” and “Tim tim? Bwa sèch,!”) that is used in folktales to invite listeners to engage with her songs. Her songs are as instructive as Haitian folktales such as Bouki and Malice, whereby there is a morality at the end. As a team of a poet and a singer, Martineau and Demesmin come together to create a new form of history based on folkloric culture and geared toward the everyday Haitian who can learn about themselves through the music. What makes Demesmin’s work and performance Creole is the ways she brings forth the various cultural aspects (European, Native American, African) historically, through the themes (Vodou), via the rhythm (congo),

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and through the language (Creole, which is influenced by French, African, and Native American languages). Demesmin’s songs are transformative. They invite Haitians to have a new relationship with their country, to rethink and rewrite its current history. The invitation to return to Bwa Kayiman, which is not just a physical space but a spiritual and cultural space as well, is vital. It is a way to push Haitians to have political, social, economic, and linguistic consciousness, empowerment and agency. In Demesmin’s songs, the creolization process is also linked to the syncretic practice of Vodou, which is in and of itself a religion of relation, contact, and exchange. Her performance as an artist, troubadour, and guardian of history continues to fundamentally shape Haiti’s history and give a voice to the voiceless, especially women. Her heart and soul remain in Haiti, and through her music, she is changing the stereotypical narratives that people often associate with Haiti.

Notes 1 Félix Morriseau-Leroy, “Tourist” and “Boat People,” PEN America, posted January 10, 2013, https://pen.org/tourist-and-boat-people/. As an activist, he wrote several poems, including “Tourist” and “Boat People,” to emphasize the exploitation of Haitians. He is also well-known for creolizing classic Greek plays, such as Antigone, to depict a Creole reality linguistically and culturally. 2 Jean Bernabé, Raphaël Confiant, and Patrick Chamoiseau, Eloge de la Créolité/ In Praise of Creoleness, trans. M. B. Taleb-Khyar (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 75. 3 Ibid., 87. 4 Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 11. 5 Another limitation is the focus of Créolité on the diversity of race in the region and its role in defining a “West Indian” identity; this is problematic because, while the various Caribbean regions have similarities, they also have their own specificity. We can mention linguistic specificity, for instance. 6 “Gloria Anzaldúa: Excerpts from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,” University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences, http:// ccat.sas.upenn.edu/romance/spanish/219/13eeuu/anzaldua.html. 7 Bernabé, Confiant, and Chamoiseau, Eloge de la Créolité, 90. 8 For more information on the Haitian Creole Academy, please see the Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen website, http://akademikreyol.net. 9 Arthur K. Spears and Carole M. Berotte Joseph, eds., The Haitian Creole Language: History, Structure, Use, and Education (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010). 10 Benjamin Hebblethwaite, “French and Underdevelopment, Haitian Creole and Development: Educational Language Policy Problems and Solutions in Haiti,” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27, no. 2 (2012): 255–302, http:// users.clas.ufl.edu/hebble/Hebblethwaite%202012%20JPCL.pdf. Hebblethwaite argues that Haiti’s French-dominant education is a hindrance to development. Following DeGraff and Dejean’s research, he highlights reasons why Creole should be used uniformly in all aspects of Haitian culture and especially in educational policy and practice to allow for a higher literacy rate and improved learning. 11 M. J. Fievre, “Creole NOT Allowed Here: An Interview with Jan Mapou, Haitian-Creole Advocate,” The Whimsical Project: The Art and Literary Blog of

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M. J. Fievre, https://mjfievre.com/creole-not-allowed-here-an-interview-with-janmapou-haitian-creole-advocate/. Jean-Claude Martineau, “The Other Occupation: The Haitian Version of Apartheid,” CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 2005, http://www.thirdworldtraveler. com/Haiti/Special_Apartheid.html. Oswald Durand, “Choucoune,” Groupe Européen de Recherches en Langues Créoles, http://creoles.free.fr/Cours/choucoune.htm. “Choucoune (Song),” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choucoune_(song). Ezra Pound, Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965 (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1973), 37. Stéphane Mallarmé, Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse, trans. Peter Manson (Oxford, OH: Miami University Press, 2012). Fatal Assistance, directed by Raoul Peck (New York: Velvet Films, 2013), DVD. Peck paints a bleak picture of the failing of international aid. Carole Demesmin, vocalist, Lawouze, 1978. Carole Demesmin is also known as Carole Maroulé. On the CD cover where René Philoctète makes this comment, the only publication information is www.chicagomusicfamily.com, a website that does not work. Translation from French to English by the author. Irène Assiba D’Almeida, ed., Janis A Meyes, trans., A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women’s Poetry in Francophone Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), xxix. All translations from Creole to English are by the author. “Tounen Lakay” is from the CD Lawouze. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New Paltz, NY: Mcpherson Publications, 1984), 24. The song “Fanm Dayiti” is from the CD Lawouze by Carole Demesmin. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 23. “Lumane Casimir” is from the CD Carole Mawoulé by Carole Demesmin.

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Gloria Anzaldúa: Excerpts from Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. http:// ccat.sas.upenn.edu/romance/spanish/219/13eeuu/anzaldua.html. Fievre, M. J. “Creole NOT Allowed Here: An Interview with Jan Mapou, HaitianCreole Advocate.” The Whimsical Project: The Art and Literary Blog of M. J. Fievre. https://mjfievre.com/creole-not-allowed-here-an-interview-with-jan-mapouhaitian-creole-advocate/. Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. Hebblethwaite, Benjamin. “French and Underdevelopment, Haitian Creole and Development: Educational Language Policy Problems and Solutions in Haiti.” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages 27, no. 2 (2012): 255–302. http:// users.clas.ufl.edu/hebble/Hebblethwaite%202012%20JPCL.pdf. Mallarmé, Stéphane. Stéphane Mallarmé: The Poems in Verse. Translated by Peter Manson. Oxford, OH: Miami University Press, 2012. Martineau, Jean-Claude. “The Other Occupation: The Haitian Version of Apartheid.” CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 2005. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Haiti/ Special_Apartheid.html.

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Morriseau-Leroy, Félix. “Tourist” and “Boat People.” PEN America, posted January 10, 2013. https://pen.org/tourist-and-boat-people/. Pound, Ezra. Ezra Pound: Selected Prose, 1909–1965. New York: New Directions Publishing, 1973. Spears, Arthur K., and Carole M. Berotte Joseph, eds. The Haitian Creole Language: History, Structure, Use, and Education. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2010.

8

An Island in crisis: theater groups and social change in Puerto Rico in the new millennium Priscilla Meléndez Trinity College

Can social and political changes be seen and measured as they are taking place? Or are they frequently recognized only a posteriori? Who are those participating in the transformations? Are they recognizing themselves as forces of change and are therefore aware of the role they are playing in their particular surroundings? In connection with the complicated nature of these inquiries, I will explore the role played by theater collectives in Puerto Rico as they contribute to change the terms of the island’s political, social, and cultural debates, particularly at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium, and in the midst of an economic crisis that has affected Puerto Rico’s stability and future, a crisis caused by financial debt, political corruption, unemployment, hurricanes, earthquakes, and, most recently, a pandemic.1 As will be shown, the most obvious departure of these groups from the traditional theater milieu is the collective nature of their creative process, in which the singular playwright is frequently absent (Fiet 2004, 267–77) and the notion of a creative voice is pluralized. Lowell Fiet describes in detail the impact that the international tendency to move away from the traditional written text—in which the emphasis fell on the presentation of an organic and central anecdote—had on Puerto Rico’s theater of the 1980s and ‘90s (ibid., 275). Instead, the new tendency focused on the interiority of fragments of a story, on the implementation of new technologies, on the prevalence of the abstract over the literal and real, and on the attempt to understand violence against humanity (ibid., 276). Nevertheless, one of the challenges of this essay will be to go beyond the historical trajectory of both traditional and nontraditional theatrical expressions on the island to identify the achievements of the theater groups examined in the context of Puerto Rico’s troubled social and political environment—one that for more than a century has been subjected to the convoluted processes of the island’s relationship with the United States. I have chosen to highlight in this study two groups that at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the millennium have fostered a sense of social and artistic responsibility utilizing wide-ranging performative strategies—puppets, cabezudos, stilt-walkers, workshops, humor, marches, DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-8

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food, the Internet—that not only integrate but also transform the paradigms of the theater groups that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s. As we move closer to the new millennium, this study will center mainly on the collectives Agua, Sol y Sereno (ASYS, founded in 1993) and Y No Había Luz (launched in 2005) in order to connect their histories and profiles to the island’s transformation. What these groups clearly have in common is their capacity to preserve the political and social commitments that previous theater collectives cultivated. But beyond this important undertaking, their contribution has been to bring new technologies to their productions, to display their awareness of the communal nature of their projects, and to constantly reaffirm the power of public spaces such as streets, barrios, houses, gardens, and cafés as mechanisms by which to reach intergenerational and underrepresented audiences. The activism of these groups can also be examined in the contexts of urban revitalization, the concern for the environment and ecology, the prioritizing of pedagogical strategies through workshops, and the opening of and access to artistic venues, among others. Most recently, the activism of these and other theater collectives on the island has been dramatically challenged in unexpected ways, immersing them (and the rest of the country) in an environment of persistent crisis. In the midst of a stagnant economy that never recovered from the 2008 recession and that inevitably exacerbated the long-standing debt carried by the public sector, Puerto Rico experienced on September 20, 2017, a category 4 hurricane that not only devastated most of the island but laid bare the fragility of a society still living under colonial power and subject to the decisions of financial oversight boards and governments outside the island. In light of this devastation, Puerto Rico’s theater collectives expanded their activism and began to reformulate the next steps in their goal to bring about major social, political, economic, and artistic transformations. Precisely two summers later—in July 2019—and in a very theatrically powerful and peaceful style, this same population that had suffered the policies of a mediocre government’s response to the hurricane, was able to create a united front that took to the streets and toppled that government, forcing the resignation of the pro-statehood governor, Ricardo Rosselló. To some extent, it can be argued that “taking the streets” and redefining spaces were already part of the theater tradition that collectives were immersed in and had been expanding since the second part of the 1990s. But just as civil society was becoming stronger and Puerto Ricans were coming to terms with their extremely vulnerable and precarious economic and political situation, several strong earthquakes shook the island in December 2019 and January 2020, creating an even grimmer picture. Sadly, two months later (and as I was writing this essay on the theme of crisis in Puerto Rico), the entire world was immersed in an unprecedented pandemic, COVID-19, that fully revealed itself in Puerto Rico in March 2020 and is expected to change the course of history. Nevertheless, in the midst of the severity of so many dire events, which have continued to threaten the

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physical, economic, and psychological stability of the island, the artistic community has been neither paralyzed nor silenced. One example among many is the recent online streaming in May 2020 of Lxs idiotas, a play conceived in 2019 by the playwright, actress, and director Sylvia Bofill: “On the threshold between fiction and reality, Lxs Idiotas presents an epidemic, which is not that of coronavirus, but which controls the interaction of the characters. The universe created by Bofill, after the beginning of the pandemic that has placed millions under confinement, is afflicted by the disease caused by capitalism, consumerism, and climate change” (“¡Nueva Función!”). Ultimately, the consequences of multiple crises, including their physical and psychological repercussions, have been lingering over Puerto Rico for at least two decades. Most historians of Puerto Rican theater have dated its origins to the nineteenth century when, traditionally, the first expressions of the island’s theatrical productions can be found. Nevertheless, theatre scholars such as Fiet remind us that, as one traces the history of this genre in the island, it is important to underscore cultural performances that exist prior to the nineteenth century and beyond the written word (Fiet 2004, 74). That is, as part of what Fiet calls theatrical memory, he alludes to ceremonies, rituals, celebrations, stories, songs, dances, and dramatic processions derived from indigenous, African, and European syncretic influences (p. 73), and he underscores how these performative gestures left a permanent mark on the island’s cultural genealogy (ibid., 75).2 Following a more traditional approach to the history of Puerto Rico’s theatrical production, the scholars Nilda González and Angelina Morfi underline the visit to the island of foreign theater and opera companies as one of the forces that contributed to the emergence of a Puerto Rican theater in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Their presence, as early as 1811, played an important role in establishing an incipient audience and promoting the creation of provisional theatrical spaces (Morfi 1980, 30).3 González also stresses that the abundance of theatrical activity in the second part of the nineteenth century was due to the fact that Puerto Rico became a favorite venue for international companies from Spain, Italy, Argentina, and Mexico (González 1979, 3). Nevertheless, it is precisely in this second part of the century when the strong voices of two Puerto Rican writers emerged on the island’s stage: Alejandro Tapia y Rivera (1926–82) and Salvador Brau (1842–1912). One of Tapia y Rivera’s most distinguished plays is La cuarterona (published in 1867 and performed in San Juan in 1877), which deals with the theme of slavery and mestizaje in Cuba, while Salvador Brau’s La vuelta al hogar is remembered for being his first play set in Puerto Rico (Morfi 1980, 75). Not surprisingly, the tradition of the indoor theater, or teatro de sala, on the island prevails both during the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century, and in the case of the latter, the names of such writers as Nemesio R. Canales (1878–1923), Luis Lloréns Torres (1878–1944), Luisa

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Capetillo (1880–1922), Fernando Sierra Berdecía (1903–1962), Emilio S. Belaval (1903–1972), and Manuel Méndez Ballester (1909–2002) are of great significance. In their respective historical moments, these writers and their plays will increase the visibility of theater and will lay the groundwork for the forces that will follow. It is during the 1930s that Puerto Rican theater begins to experience significant changes in terms of its political and social awareness; in its need to articulate a theatrical identity; in its technical development; and in the possibility of fostering a committed audience through the emergence of groups such as the Club Dramático del Casino de Puerto Rico (established in 1933), the Club Dramático del Ateneo Puertorriqueño, La Farándula Obrera (a traveling theater aimed at workers), and La Farándula Universitaria (founded in 1935, eventually Teatro Universitario), among others (Arriví, 17–18, González 1979, 9).4 Of particular importance is the launch in 1938 of the first drama contest by the Ateneo de Puerto Rico, which awarded honors to plays by Méndez Ballester (El clamor de los surcos, 1940), Gonzalo Arocho del Toro (El desmonte, 1938) and Sierra Berdecía (Esta noche juega el jóker, 1939) (González 1979, 9), opening the doors to the emergence of a national theater. For Morán Martínez, these authors established new parameters for playwriting in the country and, together with Belaval, were the most widely recognized exponents of this generation (Morán Martínez 2005, 31). The particular relevance of establishing this trajectory throughout the first decades of the twentieth century is to highlight the formation of the groundbreaking—although short-lived—theater group Areyto (1939–41) in which Leopoldo Santiago Lavandero and Emilio S. Belaval are catalytic figures (Arriví, 20; Sosa Ramos, 1994, 90). Underscoring the significance of this moment when the performance of plays by Puerto Rican authors and interpreters will become paramount, Morán Martínez states: “Areyto represented an inherent style that reflected the interests, the truths, and the needs of Puerto Ricans. It paved the way for a new generation of Puerto Rican actors, directors, set designers, and other theatre personnel” (Morán Martínez 2005, 35).5 From Lydia Esther Sosa Ramos’s point of view, it is then that the island experiences not only the emergence and benefits of having professional artists but also the advent, in 1941, of the Department of Drama at the University of Puerto Rico, the boom of school theater, and the rise of new companies and theater groups (Sosa Ramos, 1994, 89; the emphasis is mine). One of those outstanding groups is the Teatro Rodante, a branch of the Teatro Universitario, established in 1946 by Lavandero and Rafael Cruz Emeric (ibid., 109). Its importance as a non–indoor theater is stressed by Francisco Arriví as he describes its task of touring Puerto Rican towns and the countryside in an attempt to awaken the enjoyment of theater among the population (Arriví, 39). We will soon return to the examination of these expressions of outdoor theater as we reflect on their popularity, populist identity, and democratic stands, particularly in light of this essay’s

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attempt to examine the catalytic role of theater groups in the new millennium and their capacity to perform social change. As part of this historical journey, Arriví describes the creation of the Theatre Festival of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, and its first cycle from May to June of 1958 in San Juan’s Teatro Tapia, as a culminating celebration of a theatrical generation (ibid., 48), where the historical and social climate of the island is theatricalized (ibid., 50).6 Among the achievements of these festivals are placing theatrical activity center stage; expanding and educating the audience; professionalizing actors, directors, technicians; the opening of new physical venues; the emergence of other theater festivals; the circulation of the plays through publications by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture itself; and the establishment, finally, of a national theater (ibid., 60, 149; Sosa Ramos, 1994, 136, 154).7 It is precisely as the festivals continue their expansion, that critics identify the third one—that of 1960—as an important instance in which the traditional indoor theater becomes a more eclectic dramatic enterprise as it incorporates another notion of space. That is, the seven staged plays and the ballet selected that year are performed by various invited theater groups characterized by the collective nature of their art: the Department of Drama of the University of Puerto Rico, Teatro Rodante, Comedia Universitaria, and Teatro Experimental del Ateneo (Arriví 1966, 60, Sosa Ramos, 1994, 145, 150).8 In addition to this meaningful transformation, it has also been noted that by the first quinquennium of the 1960s—particularly the seventh festival of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture, in 1964—the plays performed are moving away from social realism, away from portraying the moral and economic problems of the island, and toward a strong equilibrium between the national and the universal, between the political and the poetic (see Arriví, 151), where the latter becomes an strong voice in most of the plays performed (ibid., 153–54). Fiet summarizes this period’s theatrical production: “At the beginning of the 1960s, Puerto Rican theater adopted a new more intellectual and avant-gardist perspective than the one prescribed by the ‘national theater’ of the two previous decades” (Fiet 2004, 214). By the end of the ’60s and during the ’70s, this trend becomes evident not only with important plays such as La pasión según Antígona Pérez (1968) by Luis Rafael Sánchez, but through the formation of new theater groups that had both political and aesthetic goals (ibid., 214). Among them is Teatro del Sesenta, established in 1963 by Dean Zayas; Nuevo Teatro Pobre de América created also in 1963 by Pedro Santaliz; Teatro Theatrón de Puerto Rico, founded by Victoria Espinosa and Luis Maisonet in 1964; and El Tajo del Alacrán, begun by Lydia Milagros González in 1966. Regarding this last group, Rosalina Perales reminds us that the theater piece Brecht de Brecht, produced in 1967 by El Tajo, “sets the model for a politically-engaged theatre of social protest, sometimes realistic or farcical, which brought a new tone and marked a break with the tradition of elite theatre in the island. This group theatre (performed by students and workers) is the origin of the real

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transformation of Puerto Rican theater” (Perales 1993, 263). In this context of radical transformation, one of the most revealing statements about the changes of this period comes from the pages of Lydia Milagros González’s Textos para teatro de El Tajo del Alacrán where she underscores the concerns emerging from a different and futuristic vision of theater: On a gala night at the Tapia Theatre someone in our group realized the fact that those theatre evenings filled with high society, intellectual snobbery, and elitism, had to come to an end. It would be up to us to create another type of theatre for a different audience. … It should be a theatre that went out to the streets, that would engage in protest or accompany protests. … A theatre that would go to the people. (González 1980, 238; the emphasis is mine) Other collectives that followed the transformative impetus emerge in the 1970s, including Anamú (1970), Colectivo Moriviví (1972), and El Gran Quince (1975), founded by Zora Moreno (see Fiet 2004, 214). James Martin Harding and Cindy Rosenthal, in their introduction to the anthology of essays Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and their Legacies, underscore what radical collective theaters had accomplished beginning in the 1960s and 1970s: the redefinition of the relationship between theater and political activism and, consequently, the challenge to “the traditional foundations of theatre itself” (Harding and Rosenthal 2006, 3). In this attempt to better understand the powerful role played by Puerto Rican theater groups in the new millennium, the 1970s emerges as a key moment—a springboard—when a community of young artists explore other theatrical languages that are both in consonance with international trends and also respond to Puerto Rico’s complex political, social, and artistic reality. Fiet alludes to influential international collectives who established the path for other groups to emerge: the Living Theater in New York; the Paris-based International Centre for Theatre Research, founded by Peter Brooks and Micheline Rozan; the Odin Teatret in Denmark; and, in Latin America, the well-regarded Teatro Fray Mocho in Argentina, Teatro Experimental de Cali and Teatro La Candelaria in Colombia, Grupo Teatro Escambray in Cuba, Grupo de Teatro Malayerba in Ecuador, and Yuyachkani in Peru, just to name a few (Fiet 2004, 234). In speaking about the commonalities of these groups, it is customary to allude to their collective mode of work and to emphasize that they aspire to become a popular and approachable mode of theater. As Harding and Rosenthal note, “Bringing theater to those who would otherwise not have access to it was an attempt to effect social and political change” (p. 7). Many of these theater groups follow a double track of political engagement and theatrical experimentation, promote anti-hierarchical structures, are aware of their pedagogical role, create and occupy open spaces, and openly deal with issues that affect their own economic survival. Following

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these traits, Fiet reflects on the particular expressions used by El Tajo del Alacrán such as street theater and the incorporation of cabezudos (carnival figures with enormous heads). He highlights the significant influence of Peter Schumann and his Bread and Puppet Theater (established in New York in 1963) as they took to the streets to protest against the Vietnam War and engaged in community workshops (Fiet 2004, 242). Most significantly, Fiet’s characterization of El Tajo sheds light on the path that future collectives on the island will follow, as is the case of Agua, Sol y Sereno, Y No Había Luz, Las Nietas de Nonó, and Teatro Breve. That is, they embrace the idea of theatre as an open forum for human, social, and political expression, drawing upon ironic humor, attempting to establish a direct conversation with the audience, using techniques of the popular theater, the circus, and the cabaret, and integrating into their performances or spectacles graphic, visual, and musical elements (Fiet 2004, 242–43). Approaching the theatrical reality of the 1970s, the critic, actress, and director Nilda González expands the three periods into which Jordan B. Phillips, in his Contemporary Puerto Rican Drama, divides the island’s dramatic production of the twentieth century—1938 to 1947, 1948 to 1959, and 1960to 1968—to include a fourth period beginning in 1970 (González 1979, 11–12). Beyond the commercial success of Puerto Rico… ¡fuá! (1974), written by Carlos Ferrari and performed by Teatro del Sesenta, González characterizes this new decade of the ’70s as “almost guerrilla theatre,” that is, theater of protest that establishes direct contact with its audience: Theatrical groups that have appeared in recent years, particularly those that carry their messages and ideas to the people as a form of protest, and that work with marginalized segments of society dealing with racial, political and social themes make up part of the fourth stage we have mentioned. Many of them believe in a “nontheater,” in contrast to conventional or traditional theatre. … They are a kind of collective theatre in which plays arise from the problems, current issues, and their commitment to theatre and/or the society to which they belong. (ibid., 12) These and other nontraditional forms of theatre, as Fiet calls them in El teatro puertorriqueño (2004, 276), include significant contributions by groups such as Taller de Histriones, directed by Gilda Navarra from 1971 until 1985, and Teatreros Ambulantes de Cayey. Described by Luis Rafael Sánchez as “a revolutionary artistic achievement” (Sánchez, 1988, 13), Taller’s interdisciplinary and interartistic identity (“mimodramas”) fuses dance, music, pantomime, literature, and painting in which the collective and the collaborative take center stage.9 Teatreros Ambulantes, a university group formed in the 1980s by theater director and professor Rosa Luisa Márquez and the painter and graphic artist Antonio Martorell, have described their purpose as twofold: to “create productions that can reach

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audiences that don’t usually attend the theatre, and also to turn the students into theatrical facilitators who carry out theatrical work in communities, and eventually help these communities stage their own works” (Granda 1988, 30). Teatreros not only achieved their pedagogical goals through workshops but also, as Fiet states. “was the most active and innovative theater group in Puerto Rico” between 1986 and 1990 (Fiet 2004, 296).10 Not surprisingly, a decade later one of the members of Teatreros Ambulantes, Pedro Adorno, continued in the footsteps of Márquez and Martorell, establishing the collective Agua, Sol y Sereno in 1993. Regarding the reception of these nontraditional theater expressions, Fiet offers a profoundly revealing statement about the obstacles and biases these collectives have had to face: Although [Teatreros Ambulantes] naturally received an immediate enthusiastic response from the community of artists and liberal intellectuals, progressives and leftists, for the general theatre audience, the leaps and bounds (“brincos y saltos”) of the Teatreros, as well as the aesthetics of silent body movements of the Taller de Histriones, and even the staging of a very different text such as Quíntuples, did not conform to their expectations of what Puerto Rican theatre should be. This audience … was still expecting written works, communicated through spoken dialogue, and performed in the conventional theatres. (Fiet 2004, 300)11. In a recent interview I conducted with the collective Agua, Sol y Sereno (2020), the group voiced similar concerns regarding the lack of a serious understanding by traditional audiences and cultural institutions of their complex and eclectic artistic projects.12 Nonetheless, during the 1980s and 1990s both “author-centered theatre as well as the theatre of images and movement [mentioned above] characterized the diversity of the theatrical panorama” (Dávila Santiago 1985, p. 380). I have insisted on briefly tracing the historical process of Puerto Rican theater since the early nineteenth century to finally arrive at the end of the twentieth in an attempt to understand the experimental, iconoclastic, and socially oriented forces that led to the creation, with renewed vigor, of theater collectives that are at the center stage of this study. Regarding this historical overview, Harding and Rosenthal remind us that “understanding activist theater today necessitates understanding the political and aesthetic traditions that precedes and influenced it” (Harding and Rosenthal 2006, 3). On the other hand, and looking ahead, Fiet juxtaposes the relevance of Puerto Rico’s institutional theater of the late 1980s and ’90s against the more hybrid performative expressions of that same period that combine dance, music, technology, painting, and a strong relationship with the community (Fiet 2004, 321). He states that to offer a true characterization of what is considered an original expression of Puerto Rican theater, one needs

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to include the works of outstanding nontraditional theatre people such as “the writer-performer Teresa Hernández, the collective Agua, Sol y Sereno, the performer-dancer-writer Javier Cardona, the writer-directors Rosa Luisa Márquez and Maritza Pérez Otero, the mask-making performance artist Deborah Hunt, and the playwrights-directors Pedro Santaliz and Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya” (ibid., 321). As has been established, the idea of a theater that moves outside its traditional physical boundaries to occupy streets and plazas; that travels throughout the island to connect with new and diverse audiences, engaging them in both the creative process and the performance; that uses various styles of music and dance; that sees and trains the performer’s body in a comprehensive manner and subsequently transmits this knowledge to the audience; and that is concerned with sociopolitical issues becomes emblematic of an artistic expression that is clearly multifaceted, anti-authoritative, and hybrid in terms of its identity.13 Regarding the practice of “collective theatre,” the Cuban scholar Vivian Martínez Tabares points out that “the term became a specific category in Latin America used to refer to the grouping of artists who were moved by common aesthetic and ideological notions which led them to work together” (Helfeld and Bonilla 2015). For his part, Pedro Adorno, one of the founders and leaders of Agua, Sol y Sereno, further defines this theatrical experience by pointing out that “collective groups are a laboratory of new women and men who dreamed of the revolutions of the 1960s. The experience with base communities and horizontal civic participation has major consequences in the collective practice of Latin American theatre, centered not on an author but on a group” (ibid.). In consonance with the serious sociopolitical commitment of these collectives, Rosalina Perales underscores their use of parody, the absurd, and the attention to everyday realities in their works (Perales 1993, 264). She also singles out the use of distancing techniques and of didacticism as a means to achieve social transformation (characteristic of Brechtian theater), and emphasizes the use of open-air spaces as emblematic of popular and political theater (Perales 1993, 264). Not surprisingly, critics stress the “energy, variety of tropes, polyrhythmic expressiveness, and experimentation with body and spaces” characteristic of the performances of theater collectives (Fiet 2006, 64). At the dawn of the millennium and five years after the beginning of the twenty-first century, two theater groups arose in Puerto Rico—Agua, Sol y Sereno, founded in 1993, and Y No Había Luz, begun in 2005—that are currently using their creative tools to react to and enter into dialogue with the country’s devastating twenty-year-long economic crisis, which literally and metaphorically has now reached hurricane force. They are not only active but are constantly evolving in response to the new aesthetic, psychological, social, economical, political, and world circumstances. That is, they are committed to communities near to and far from their surroundings in the San Juan area, to education, to celebrating community figures, to denouncing injustice, to defending the environment, to breaking barriers

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between groups, to closely interacting with children, and to participating in cultural projects in the San Sebastián Street Festival, the Campechadas, and the Titeretada. More significantly, in the midst of the 2020 pandemic, Agua, Sol y Sereno and Y No Había Luz have adapted their projects to extremely challenging conditions through online videos, interviews, and workshops. ASYS has used these alternative means as a way to stay in touch with their audience, whereas Y No Había Luz has utilized them to further their educational projects, especially for children.14 The respective works of these experimental groups demonstrate how they confront institutional, economic, and artistic challenges while tracing new paths to achieve the transformation of both the communities they serve and of themselves as part of those communities. As is well-known, Puerto Rico’s complex history, in which colonialism has been a determining factor in every aspect of the island’s reality, establishes a symbiotic relationship with the artistic representation of those painful realities. That is, while one can recognize that the sociopolitical debacle and traumas experienced by a country lacking the freedom to choose its own destiny continue to be the recurrent topic in Puerto Rico’s theatrical imaginary, I would argue that what seems different in the context of the new millennium’s collectives is their ironic awareness of a doubleedged interdependence between what is being denounced (dysfunctionality and crisis) and the voices (their own) making the denunciation. In other words, the island’s persistent state of crisis (financial debt, corruption, lack of opportunities, unemployment, migration, racial disparities, social fragmentation, and dreams that easily vanish) become these groups’ source of artistic creation (as ironic beneficiaries) while these same horrors threaten their existence, turning them into potential victims. This symbiotic relationship was implicitly portrayed in 2017, when, weeks after Hurricane María destroyed most of the infrastructure of the island and changed the lives and futures of its residents, the group Teatro Breve produced, among others, a two-minute video, Las Housewives de Miramar, satirizing the colonized reaction of the members of the upper class as they planned to escape to their second homes in Miami, leaving the devastated communities in Puerto Rico to fend for themselves. The character of Rita, quite teary but wearing fashionable exercise attire, expresses her fear for the future—“Things here are going to get worse. This is going to be like Cuba”—while Tere’s husband pays $2,000 per plane ticket to move his family to the United States. But beyond the hilarious characterization of the wealthy Americanized Puerto Rican women chastised by the socially and politically conscientious Awilda—who promotes the anticolonial “do it yourself attitude”—it seems quite ironic that this video circulated for the first time on October 10, 2017, when the island’s power grid was severely damaged and very few people had Internet connections. That is, to add insult (no power for months) to injury (a category 4 hurricane), this sketch

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could hardly be viewed by those experiencing the devastation (no power, no Internet, no batteries), stressing how this theater collective was parodying its surroundings knowing full well that those affected had no immediate access to the criticism. Should we assume, then, that the targeted audience was not only those of us who are part of the diaspora but particularly the socialites who, with their economic power, could flee to Miami or somewhere in the United States and could see, via the Internet, the sketches caricaturing their own pathetic identity?15 In this attempt to trace the links between Puerto Rico’s persistent state of crisis marked by political, social, and economic failures and the role played by the arts, it is inevitable that we confront some of the conflictive ways in which this relationship has been portrayed in the last two decades. Not surprising, but certainly ironic, is the view that art is capable of healing and repairing wrongs—that is, art is seen as a palliative to societal problems. A salient example of this perspective surfaces in the language used in a promotional video produced by the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture that describes the arts and culture festival Campechada, in which both collectives Agua, Sol y Sereno, and Y No Había Luz have actively and successfully participated.16 This video emphasizes the institute’s role in organizing a three-day event that includes painting workshops, open-air theater, carnival dances, music, and, above all, the active participation of the community. But most significantly, and without diminishing at all the artistic and pedagogical value of this project and its impact on the community, what drew my attention was the video’s rather high-sounding rhetoric, since it speaks of the Campechada as a vehicle of integration, a union of wills, a magical event symbolizing creativity and love of Puerto Rican cultural values. The festival’s activities are described as “spiritual nourishment” and a source of cultural credibility; as an encounter that goes beyond ideologies and specific political agendas; and even as an event with serious economic impact, having created two hundred jobs during its first season while also stimulating shopping in the district of Old San Juan. The video even claims that the Campechada is a cultural activity with a healing purpose.17 But what is significant (and also ironic) in the context of an island in crisis is that this edifying image of art is turned upside down by the inevitable unmasking of the precarious social, economic, and moral condition of Puerto Rico. That is, faced with the lack of social cohesion, art becomes a vehicle for unity; faced with the hunger of the spirit, art becomes an urgent form of nourishment; in an ailing world, artistic expressions become a palliative. One wonders, then, if this problematic view of art as medicine that will attempt to cure sociopolitical and economic diseases is just another illusion of the sort we find and celebrate in theater and in other artistic expressions.18 But as both Agua, Sol y Sereno and Y No Había Luz contributed to the success and achievements of the Campechadas, we dare to suggest that the famous cabezudos, puppets, street performances, and commitment to the community of these collectives are less an illusion of a cure for the island’s

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ills and more an enlarged portrayal of art as a complex, highly visible, selfconscious, and self-reflexive process that is inevitably woven into the country’s reality. In the case of the first Campechada (2011), dedicated to the eighteenth-century Puerto Rican painter José Campeche, Pedro Adorno of ASYS stresses the festival’s capacity to do cultural reengineering to the extent that it creates original artistic productions inspired by the lives and works of both well-known and unknown, past and present Puerto Rican artists, while the collective incorporates the audience into the performance (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña 2011). Also within a popular and pedagogical vain, Beba Helfeld, a member of Y No Había Luz, states in the video Campechada 2011-ICP how the festival represented for this group an act of self-education, through which they learned about Puerto Rican art history from its beginnings and then were able to share their acquired knowledge with the spectators. Clearly, we see in both cases the example of performance projects that aim to change traditional structures—in this case, dismantling hierarchy (the one who teaches is considered above the learner)—while establishing, in turn, a horizontal and democratic structure in its relationship with the audience and also in terms of authority and authorship (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña 2011). Not surprisingly, the names of these two collectives, Agua, Sol y Sereno and Y No Había Luz, can be metaphorically connected to images of challenge, of dealing with difficulties, and ways to confront them. Might they be referring to the ups and downs of Puerto Rico’s historical realities? To the complex challenges that artists in general and collectives, in particular, confront in a political, economic, and cultural space where support arrives sporadically and is subject to partisan comings and goings? On the one hand, the name of the collective Agua, Sol y Sereno underscores the capacity of those exposed to hardships to confront them at any cost, or, as one could said, “contra viento y marea” (against all odds). It goes without saying that constant exposure to water, sun, and (unhealthy) night air are just some of the realities of living on an island that can uplift but also deteriorate lives and objects, thus signifying the literal and metaphorical challenges that Puerto Ricans are constantly dealing with. But most importantly, being strong and creative in the face of calamities is a manifestation of resilience, as is seen in ASYS’s production Una de cal y una de arena (1996), the oldest and most well-traveled of their works. The title of this production—based on a popular saying that translates as “a mixed bag”—places the attention on issues that supposedly alternate between the positive and the negative as part of constructing a solid structure. The challenge is to actually create a base, and eventually a product, that is capable of sustaining the building and not one that collapses because of its faulty materials and construction. Not surprisingly, the performance itself takes place in an open space—on the “construction site”—and the principal theme is about unplanned physical construction on the island at the expense of nature and the environment.19 Some of the characters are

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construction workers who are building excessively under the control of investors, but the audience also encounters a homeless and fragile woman who is looking for her birthplace and a space that has been destroyed by urban sprawl: “She is one of thousands displaced to public housing from their expropriated neighborhoods, torn down by uncontrolled development” (Fiet 2004, 334). The river and trees are now buried under the new construction of malls, hotels, houses, roads, and more roads. As stated, the idea of building without regulations creates serious difficulties, such as the aforementioned displacement and abandonment. But what, then, would be the so-called positive angle (the sand) of “una de cal y una de arena” that is suggested in this popular saying? Is there at all a celebratory aspect in the midst of the explicit critique of consumerism, American colonialism (some of the construction workers are speaking English), and the power of money? Beyond the idea of construction as equivalent to destruction, one can also interpret the collective nature of a theater where everyone actively participates in its “construction,” as an implicit message where something positive and life-changing becomes part of the equation. Building together a stronger future where investors are not the ones controlling the space (the island) is key to building another type of language, one where theater and dialogue and music are paramount to the construction of a new reality.20 In the case of the latter, although traditional musical instruments are absent, music is present from the beginning and throughout the play in a very ingenious way: the huge white and blue plastic containers, orange traffic cones, PVC tubes, and cans of paint that occupied the construction site are transformed into percussion instruments that are harmoniously hammered by the characters. Performed in the Península de Cantera in Santurce, a community that has resisted displacement and where running water is sometimes scarce because of the deteriorated Puerto Rico Water Authority (Autoridad de Acueductos y Alcantarillados), the performance ends with the characters playing music with another type of plastic container, the kind frequently used by families to store water when the malfunctioning system is shut down. It is not possible to examine other performances by ASYS here, but it is pertinent to mention that the collective’s concerns with displacement, space, land use and abuse, poverty, and activism in the face of injustice also emerge in their performance Comer (Circo Fest Agua, Sol y Sereno 2016), which deals with Puerto Rico’s struggle to become sustainable and independent in its food production. One can metaphorically conceive that the stolen land used to “develop” commercial projects as portrayed in Una de cal y una de arena is the same one that needs to be reclaimed to give rise to new agroecological projects to solve Puerto Rico’s problem with food selfsufficiency. As the farmer Ian Pagán Roig from the Josco Bravo project states in the Facebook discussion “Conversatorio virtual: Del teatro a la siembra” (From theater to farming) held between ASYS and a diverse group of agroecologists, the power of an agricultural system that is ecologically

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sound (and not a “commercial appendix” of the United States) needs to come from the idea of transforming the country from below, that is, from the earth itself, with the conviction that these actions can overcome the political and economic difficulties Puerto Rico has experienced for so long (Agua, Sol y Sereno, “Conversatorio virtual” 2020). It is clear, then, that in the world of Puerto Rico’s collectives during the end of a millennium and the beginning of another, the rhetorical question and subsequent answer of the mask maker, puppeteer, and performance artist Deborah Hunt becomes more than emblematic: “Why make art if not to reflect and change the world that we face everyday? … We create art with the conviction that a better world is possible” (Hunt 2019). Returning to the names of these collectives, one would like to think that the Puerto Rican theater group Y No Había Luz (And There Was No Light) chose its suggestive name to antagonize the ever-penniless Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, which, because of its bankrupt condition, is capable of spoiling anyone’s party or show with a simple blackout. But instead, the phrase “y no había luz” is derived from a Russian folktale in which the mythical Slavic figure of Baba Yaga wanders into the woods and becomes lost. Interestingly, in the Spanish translation of this folktale, instead of saying that “night fell” in the forest, the phrase “and there was no light” is used—an image that captivated the members of the theater group (Octavio 2015). One might argue that this anecdote prefigures the mysterious and playful strategies of this theater collective, which constantly shifts between light and shadow, words and images, matter and metaphor. In the context of the aforementioned view of crisis and illness in Puerto Rican society, it is also possible to underscore the rise and development of Y No Había Luz. The group’s emergence in 2005 at the University of Puerto Rico is itself a creative act that should be interpreted in terms of the collective’s work ethic, its trajectory as a group, and the plays they produce, most of which are original productions. Cutendencia (2006), presented in the Taller Internacional de Títeres in Matanzas, Cuba, Repertorio (2008), Fin del sueño (2010), and Diego el ciego (2013) are some of their well-known productions. In an interview in 2019, the collective summarized their work: “For the past fourteen years, we have created a theater repertoire of original plays, art exhibitions, short films, documentaries, multiple workshops and, more recently, illustrated books” (Van Marissing Méndez 2019). Their plays of the last five years attest to the group’s increasing visibility on the Puerto Rican stage, particularly América (2015), which was part of the innovative resident artists and companies program of the Puerto Rico Fine Arts Center; the exhibition Y No Había Luz: Diez años de trayectoria at the Puerto Rico Art Museum (2015); and El retablo de Maese Pedro (2016), a puppet opera by Manuel de Falla performed at the prestigious 2016 Casals Festival with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. After Hurricane María in 2017, the group traveled to fourteen municipalities to offer community workshops, and in 2019 they participated in the Santo Domingo International Book

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Fair with the play El centinela de Mangó and also in the Circus of Absence, an exhibit both on the island and at the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture in Chicago (ibid.): “Under the tent of ‘Circus of Absence,’ extroverted characters manifest social-political situations through their enticing circus spectacle. Through these acts, the realities of Puerto Rican identity are revealed: life as a colony, a shortage of political leadership, a migrant movement in the twenty-first century, food scarcity, mental health, a wilting capitalism, the Jones Act, voices against diversity and gender equality, among others” (Y No Había Luz 2018, 2018). Alluding to other performances by the group and in contrast to those, Rosa Luisa Márquez describes Circus of Absence: “We’ll then be spectators of this miniature circus. Today, the performers of Y No Había Luz will not be running across fields, nor handling giant cabezudos that cry rivers of gauze that drag small houses in their wake, nor throwing giant balls to the audience to play with them. This time the performance will be on a small scale. We will be the giants. Perhaps this option is the fitting minimalist proposal that our times demand” (Márquez 2017). In regard to the members of this collective, Y No Había Luz is typical of the ethos of the sociohistorical group to which most of them belong, the socalled millennial generation, whose defining traits include their talent for self-expression, their sense of justice, their optimism, their penchant for evolution and adaptation to new changes, and their determination to preserve their individual integrity in the midst of projects that focus on the collective (Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends 2010).21 Y No Había Luz have taken laudable risks in launching themselves on an enterprise that Deborah Hunt jokingly compares with the task of giving birth to and raising a child (Helfeld and Bonilla 2015). In 2005, still in their early twenties, the members of Y No Había Luz set out on their collective project even as they were themselves developing as individuals, as artists, and as political and social beings. The documentary Una mirada interna de un grupo de teatro (2015), produced by the group to celebrate their tenth anniversary, is a synthesis of the decade-long theatrical trajectory of the group that allows viewers to appreciate the challenges it has faced and what makes this collective so distinctive. The group has been able to grow and consolidate itself artistically in the midst not only of the innumerable crises on the island but also of the personal and interpersonal growth of its members. Openly explored in the documentary, this personal aspect (including love relationships among them) sheds light on the complexity of this type of collective artistic project. It is undeniable that within the independent, populist, and democratic modality of a collective, the mission of Y No Había Luz encompasses many of the same social, aesthetic, and political concerns of the theater groups that have preceded them, as they point out in their mission statement about their goals both within Puerto Rico and internationally.22 For example, in the mode of Bread and Puppet Theater, and deriving from the workshops

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some of the group’s members have taken with Deborah Hunt, Y No Había Luz is deeply involved in the world of masks and puppets, in which human figures allow themselves to be taken over by unreal beings, and the puppets control and become masters of the living beings. In other words, this theater group constructs a reality in which the material world of the body and that of imagination and dreams coexist in both playful and tragic ways. However, unlike other groups, Y No Había Luz has no central figure to lead its projects, facing, instead, the challenges inherent in a system of collective decision-making. Although it is impressive that such an open and collaborative structure has managed to last more than fifteen years, its own members point out that it has been a difficult and sometimes painful process, since this mode of collaboration tends to delay the conclusion of their projects. Yari Helfeld states, “This is our greatest strength, but also our biggest weakness” (Octavio 2015). However, in spite of these challenges, the horizontal, democratic, and antihierarchical stance of the group (the “lack of a head,” as Martínez Tabares says) has been effective as a creative stimulus and as a political position. It is thus not surprising that the documentary Una mirada interna begins with the image of a single head as a symbol of unity in the midst of diversity and movement. In their own words: Our collective has a horizontal structure. This is positive for our work since it allows the individual development of its members, while proposing an alternative social structure that is more committed, and at the same freer in its intention of being more just and less oppressive than the social structure in which we live. Our collective is an animal with many legs, many hands, many hearts, many heads that move slowly but with full awareness of each step and its reason. We are not summiting to the establish norms, but instead, this is our way of proposing change by doing it. (Helfeld and Bonilla 2015) Y No Había Luz’s communitarian stance leads them to reconceptualize the space of the street by inviting in all those who walk on it. The fact that the group now has its own space in which they hold theater workshops for children and adults in a location as central as Ponce de León Avenue in Santurce is a milestone of sorts.23 It would take too long to describe this group’s role in the urban revival being experienced by Santurce, an area of San Juan that has gone through serious economic crises and loss of population. Initiatives such as the Santurce es Ley project and Los Muros Hablan (The Walls Speak) have helped stimulate the area’s growth, turning it into an important artistic and cultural district to which young artists gravitate.24 The collective’s practice of shuttling between the streets, their own work space, and various cultural spaces is evident in the closing event of the 2015 exhibit Y No Había Luz: Diez años de trayectoria at the Puerto Rico Art Museum. Five months after opening at the museum, the exhibit was returning to its home in Santurce, and for this task, the group called upon all

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interested community members to take to the streets as part of the carnival troupe that would return the masks, puppets, and other memorabilia back to their home. Y No Había Luz promotes the interdisciplinary aspect of its art by means of the fusion of theater, dance, and music, but above all through the making and use of masks and puppets out of discarded materials, papier-mâché, and textiles. It is possible to conceive that the theoretical concept of “new materialism” helps us to better understand these young artists’ vision, which calls attention to the dynamic and mobile aspects of the matter. In this view, objects that initially appear inert and inanimate begin to display their own force and resistance, imposing their rules on the artists who work with them. Thus masks, puppets, buckets, balls, swatches of cloth, and practically everything else on the stage ceases to be motionless objects and begin to display their vitality, their force, by shifting from being form to becoming content—that is, becoming a mode of communication that is consonant with language but that can go even beyond language.25 It is not by chance that Julio Morales, one of the members of Y No Había Luz, observes: In the process of exploration, there are moments when you discover something. One is playing with the cloth, and the cloth does something that amazes all of us. I have no idea what it means, but we all have the feeling that it’s communicating something, that there’s a mystery to how that cloth behaves when moved by the wind. There are many scenes in this kind of theater we do that are open to interpretation, because we want you to also experience that same feeling of amazement and multiple interpretations we had. (Octavio 2015) It may be argued, then, that the 2015 celebration of the tenth year of collective work by Y No Había Luz became an invitation to examine the group’s trajectory, not as a reaction or response to Puerto Rico’s crisis, but as an integral part of it, encouraging us to think of the group members simultaneously as artists, actors, interpreters, and audience of the “Puerto Rican drama” that has been, for good or ill, their very own. In other words, we argue that this collective is constituted within a national reality that is seen as fragmented, uncertain, and divergent and that the group seeks to give shape to while recognizing its origins in the crisis. Above all, Y No Había Luz’s seven members display in their plays and in their own reflections the personal, individualized nature of their task. They speak openly about the complicated human relations—sometimes amorous and intimate—that are part of the group’s origins, and they give voice to critical opinions about social problems such as isolation, environmental degradation, and the economic crisis. Searching for authenticity and exploring their own individuality in the context of the collective, the members of Y No Había Luz interweave art and activism, the communal and the personal, materiality and abstraction, seeking to erase the borders between

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these concepts. As many of the group’s members declare, the goal of their artistic projects is to erase the generational gaps and share the artistic and social sensibilities of all the group’s members, looking for integration, not exclusion, for coalition, not a struggle for power. Through their plays, workshops, carnival troupes, community work, pedagogy, and politics, Y No Había Luz aspires to form integrated individuals who struggle against fragmentation and dispersion, as well as against imposed ideas—and this view is also applied to society as a whole. Making masks and puppets thus becomes a liberating means of communication, since the puppet, in Y No Había Luz’s vision, says what it wants to say and never asks for permission to express its feelings and desires. Again, in the words of Deborah Hunt: “With the puppets we create, transform, denounce, and celebrate. With them, we open portals into extraordinary and complete worlds that challenge conventional visions. They are capable of transforming superficial reality as a challenge to the banality and criminality of power structures” (Hunt 2019). As stated from the beginning, the role played by theater collectives in Puerto Rico at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium has been to transform the terms of the island’s political, social, and cultural debates in the midst of the intense crises that have affected Puerto Rico’s stability and future. I began this essay with a series of inquiries about the notion of changing the reality of a country through theater and asking if these collectives see themselves as forces of change and are therefore aware of the role they are playing in their particular surroundings. After tracing the complex history of Puerto Rican theater since the nineteenth century and underscoring the roots of collectives in the island, we can answer some of these questions. Agua, Sol y Sereno and Y No Había Luz are two of numerous collectives that have a coherent understanding of the relationship between politics and art and of their own role as leaders of the street comparsas that will change Puerto Rico’s future.

Notes 1 It is particularly significant that as J.A. Collins reflects on the Puerto Rico of the eighteenth century and its relationship to theater, he underscores that “Pestilence, wars, storms and political oppression were everyday facts of life except for the privileged few. It is against this dreary background that the development of theater in Puerto Rico must be viewed” (pp. xiv-xvi). 2 In the same light, J. A. Collins has briefly looked into the island’s theatrical expressions from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, underscoring the role of the Roman Catholic Church: “The Church would allow comedies or skits to be performed in connection with feast days, especially Corpus Christi. … But, just as had happened in medieval Europe, abuses crept in; and by the middle of the following century the Constitution declared that any representations held must be of a divine nature and that, in any event, they could not be given within churches. Church censorship of the theater continued in Puerto Rico well into the nineteenth century” (XIV).

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3 The arrival in Puerto Rico of the printing press in 1806 and the establishment of newspapers in the early part of the century (La Gaceta de Puerto Rico, El Diario Económico, El Investigador) also represent other significant milestones in the cultural and artistic development of the island (Morfi 1980, 15). In the newspaper El Diario Liberal y de Variedades de Puerto Rico (1821–22) there is an editorial promoting the construction of a theater for the capital (ibid.Morfi, 15), although it is not until 1832 that the first theater is built in San Juan: the Teatro Municipal, now Teatro Tapia (ibid., 30). 4 Regarding the tradition of the workers’ theater in Puerto Rico, Fiet underscores that in the late nineteenth and first two decades of the twentieth centuries there is an active workers’ movement that will express itself in artistic and dramatic terms (Fiet 2004, 46). See Rubén Dávila Santiago’s Teatro obrero de Puerto Rico (1900–1920). 5 As Arriví points out, some of the offshoots of Areyto are the establishment in 1943 of a society of actors (Sociedad General de Actores) by Manuel Méndez Ballester, Tinglado Puertorriqueño in 1944 (Arriví 1966, 27, 29), la Comedia Estudiantil Universitaria (1974), Teatro Nuestro (1950), Teatro Experimental del Ateneo in 1952 (Arriví 1967, 60), Teatro Nuestro (1950), and Teatro Experimental del Ateneo in 1952 (ibid., 60). 6 The Institute of Puerto Rican Culture was established in 1955 under the direction of Ricardo Alegría. 7 The Theatre Festival of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture has promoted the creation of other theater groups performing both national and international plays: La Máscara, Teatro Incorporado, Teatro Yukayeque, Teatro de Comedias, Teatro El Cemí, Producciones Cisne, Teatro del Sesenta, Teatro Theatrón, and Café Teatro Candilejas, among others (Arriví, 149; Sosa Ramos, 1994, 159). 8 For a detailed analysis of the emergence of Teatro Escolar in 1960, see Morán Martínez’s “The Development of Teatro Escolar, the Theatre Program of the Public Education System in Puerto Rico: From 1960 to 1990.” 9 The exquisite 1988 publication Polimnia: Taller de Histriones (1971–1985) is a compilation of short reflections by scholars, documentation of Navarra’s artistic philosophy, and valuable drawings and photos of the theater productions. In this volume, Rosa Luisa Márquez’a “El quehacer de un taller” briefly examines the dynamics of Navarro’s creative process in the work Ocho mujeres (1974), inspired by Federico García Lorca’s La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936). Almost forty-three years later, Márquez herself establishes a profound dialogue through dance theater between Navarro’s work and her own Hij@s de la Bernarda (2017). 10 Rosa Luisa Márquez and Antonio Martorell have continued to work together on hybrid projects that merge performance and painting. Months after Hurricane María devastated the infrastructure of the island and almost did the same with the artistic community, Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut (under the auspices of Dean Anne Lambright), embarked on a project to invite scholars and artists from the island to the college. In March 2018, Márquez and Martorell were guest artists for a week, sharing with students and the Hartford community lectures, workshops, and the performance To Play Is the Thing! Jugando Mamá, jugando … 11 While speaking of Puerto Rican theater of the 1980s, it is paramount to emphasize Luis Rafael Sánchez’s Quíntuples (1985) and how it undermines its own textuality as it theatricalizes orality, improvisation, the apparent absence of dialogue between the characters, and the ironic conceptualization between unity and plurality.

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12 In July of 2020 Aníbal González and I interviewed, via Zoom, members of Agua, Sol y Sereno, and in August we visited the group’s workshop space in Santurce. 13 As we allude to the actor’s physical and emotional training, it is pertinent to mention the influence of the system established by the Russian actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski during the first part of the twentieth century, which places the “emphasis on gesture and ritualized movement” (Rea). Other figures, such as the Polish theater theorist and director Jerzy Grotowski (known for his Poor Theatre in the 1970s) and the Italian author and theater director Eugenio Barba, have also had impact in terms of developing acting techniques and theories of performance. 14 Right before the pandemic reached Puerto Rico in March 2020, ASYS was working on the project Vejigantes pregoneros, which has been postponed as of this writing. Nevertheless, on Facebook and Instagram the group is now posting videos about the methodologies and processes they are using in this work as a strategy to stay connected with their audience. Because of the cancellation of inperson summer camps, Y No Había Luz offered a one-week remote workshop for children titled Verano Zefirante, where the young participants will make masks and puppets, engage in theatrical games, and deal with environmental issues through gardening (http://ynohabialuz.com/). 15 Among other videos produced by Teatro Breve immediately after Hurricane María was Las hermanas Belén y Verónica se preparan para ofrecer alivio. As expected, Las Housewives de Miramar have also responded to the COVID-19 pandemic with the video Las Housewives desde la cuarentena. 16 See the video documentary Campechada 2011-ICP by Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. The Campechada was first organized in 2011 to commemorate the two hundred-year anniversary of the death of the first major Puerto Rican painter, José Campeche (1751–1809). 17 The director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture at the time, Mercedes Gómez, the director of the Puerto Rico Art Museum, Dr. Lourdes Ramos-Rivas, and several residents of Old San Juan are among the voices that hail the magnitude and significance of the first Campechada (Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña 2011). 18 The relationship between an ailing society and art in the context of Puerto Rico’s artistic reality dates back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it appears as a subject in a series of four novels titled Chronicles of a Sick World by the Puerto Rican narrator and physician Manuel Zeno Gandía (1855–1930). It is not by chance that Zeno Gandía’s texts arose in times of deep crisis, encompassing the last decade of Spanish colonialism through the invasion and establishment of the United States’ colonial rule over Puerto Rico after the Spanish-American War of 1898. La charca was published in 1894, Garduña in 1896, El negocio in 1922, and Redentores in 1925. 19 I saw online a recent production of Una de cal y una de arena, which ASYS performed as part of the Proyecto Península de Cantera, a community in San Juan that has continuously struggled with its social and economic well-being. In Teatro puertorriqueño reimaginado, Fiet offers a solid analysis of this project as it was performed in 1996 (2004, 331–39). 20 In October 2014 the play Una de cal y una de arena was performed in the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez campus, which is noted for its emphasis on science and engineering. 21 The “millennial generation” refers to those born between 1980 and 1996: “the first generation to come of age in the new millennium” (Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends, 2010).

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22 As stated on the group’s website, their goal is to “provide interdisciplinary artistic experiences that awaken in individuals their sensitivity, sense of beauty, creativity, freedom of thought and spirit, conscience, solidarity, and social justice in Puerto Rico and the world” (http://ynohabialuz.com/). 23 The dialogue the group establishes with the audience and the audience’s participation in the performances have their roots in the community workshops that take place prior to the performances, since the participants all collaborate in making the puppets and in their choreography (Y No Había Luz, 2013). 24 Santurce es Ley is a street festival “organized by artists and local art gallery owners” (Palacios and Nanetti, 2014). 25 “Varying in details, the shared characteristic of the phenomenologists in the early twentieth century shows the newly charged meaning of material in relation to the ontology of things. For instance, Heidegger loaded a full range of meaning to the word thing (ding), with its widest sense which comprised anything that is ‘a something not nothing’” (Hong 2016).

Bibliography Agua, Sol y Sereno. Comer. Circo Fest. 2016. Agua, Sol y Sereno. “Del teatro a la siembra.” Facebook webinar, July 12, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/aguasolyserenopr/videos/590778438490351. Agua, Sol y Sereno. Una de cal y una de arena. https://www.facebook.com/watch/? v=3003102733093670. Arriví, Francisco. Areyto Mayor. Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1966. Arriví, Francisco. Conciencia puertorriqueña del teatro contemporáneo, 1937–1956. Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1967. Cantera Península de. “Agua, Sol y Sereno presentó ayer la obra de teatro Una de cal y otra de arena.” Facebook, October 19, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/watch/? v=3003102733093670. Collins, J. A. Contemporary Theater in Puerto Rico: The Decades of the Seventies. Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1982. Dávila Santiago, Rubén. Teatro obrero de Puerto Rico (1900–1920). Editorial Edil, 1985. Díaz Quiñones, Arcadio. “Histriones: Sujetos de su propia historia.” In Polimnia: Taller de Histriones (1971–1985). Edited by Gilda Navarra. Taller de Histriones and Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1988, 15–21. Febres, Tania. “Entrevista a Julio Morales y Yari Helfeld de la compañía de teatro Y No Había Luz.” YouTube, January 16, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= x6UFLa6UaA8. Fiet, Lowell. “La dramaturgia reivindicada: El teatro puertorriqueño actual.” Revista del Insituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña 6, no. 12 (2006): 64–77. Fiet, Lowell. El teatro puertorriqueño reimaginado: Notas críticas sobre la creación dramática y el performance. Ediciones Callejón, 2004. González, Lydia Milagros. Textos para teatro de El Tajo del Alacrán. Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1980. González, Nilda. Bibliografía de teatro puertorriqueño (siglos XIX y XX). Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1979. Granda, Julián. “Los teatreros ambulantes de Puerto Rico: Estudiantes en la escena.” OCLAE [Organización Continental Latinoamericana de Estudiantes] 21, no. 1 (1988): 29–33.

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Harding, James Martin, and Cindy Rosenthal. Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and their Legacies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006. Helfeld, Nami, and Pedro Iván Bonilla, directors. Y No Había Luz: Una mirada interna de un grupo teatral. 10th anniversary commemorative video. Produced by Yari Helfeld, 2015. Hong, JeeHee. “Material, Materiality.” University of Chicago: Theories of Media: Keywords Glossary, May 23, 2016. http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/ material.htm. Hunt, Deborah. “Titeretada 2019.” Periódico Claridad, April 10, 2019. https:// www.claridadpuertorico.com/titeretada-2019/. Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, producer. Campechada 2011-ICP. Coproduced by the Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, 2011. https://www.icp.pr.gov/campechada/# :~:text=San%20Juan%20%E2%80%93%20Con%20la%20uni%C3%B3n,cultural %20denominado%20‘Campechada’%2C%20los. Márquez, Rosa Luisa. August 2017. http://ynohabialuz.com/circo-de-la-ausencia/. “Presentation of Circo de la ausencia” San Juan, PR Márquez, Rosa Luisa. “El quehacer de un taller.” In Polimnia: Taller de Histriones (1971–1985). Edited by Gilda Navarra. Taller de Histriones and Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1988, 23–28. Morán Martínez, Manuel A. “The Development of Teatro Escolar, the Theatre Program of the Public Education System in Puerto Rico: From 1960 to 1990.” Doctoral diss. New York University, 2005. Morfi, Angelina. Historia crítica de un siglo de teatro puertorriqueño. Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1980. Navarra, Gilda, editor. Polimnia: Taller de Histriones. Taller de Histriones and Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña,1988. “¡Nueva Función! Lxs Idiotas de Sylvia Bofill, versión RadioStream.” Facultad de Humanidades, Universidad de Puerto Rico, n.d. http://humanidades.uprrp.edu/lxsidiotas-de-sylvia-bofill-version-radiostream/. Octavio, Joaquín. “¿Qué aprendemos de una compañía de teatro como Y No Había Luz?” Y No Había Luz, October 22, 2015. http://ynohabialuz.com/resena-sobreel-foro-en-la-upr-por-joaquin-octavio/. Palacios, Luis E., and Giuliana Nanetti. “Santurce es arte.” El Nuevo Herald, August 9, 2014. http://www.elnuevoherald.com/vivir-mejor/viajes/article2038143.html. Perales, Rosalina. “Puerto Rico.” Teatro hispanoamericano contemporáneo, 1967–1987. Grupo Editorial Gaceta, 1993. Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends. “Millennials: Confident. Connected. Open to Change.” February 24, 2010. http://www.pewsocialtrends. org/2010/02/24/millennials-confident-connected-open-to-change/. Rea, Kenneth Grahame. “Theatre of the 20th Century and Beyond.”Britannica Academic, 2019. https://academic-eb-com.ezproxy.trincoll.edu/levels/collegiate/ article/Western-theatre/105998#274750.toc. Ríos Rigau, Aldín. “Y No Había Luz o la integración de las artes.” Y No Había Luz, April 28, 2016. http://ynohabialuz.com/vision-doble/. Sánchez Luis Rafael. “La inolvidable orgía del silencio.” In Polimnia: Taller de Histriones (1971–1985). Edited by Gilda Navarra. Taller de Histriones and Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, 1988, 11–13.

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Sánchez, Luis Rafael. Quíntuples. Ediciones del Norte,1985. Sánchez, Luis Rafael. La pasión según Antígona Pérez. Editorial Cultural,1968. Simone, Ronald T., and Marc Estrin. Rehearsing with Gods: Photographs and Essays on the Bread and Puppet Theater. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004. Sosa Ramos, Lydia Esther. Desarrollo del teatro nacional en Puerto Rico. Escenario, 1994. Teatro Breve. “Las Housewives of Miramar después del huracán María.” YouTube, October 10, 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJgS_winTDU. Van Marissing Méndez, Neeltje. “Revitalizing through the Arts: Meet Y No Había Luz.” Flamboyán Foundation, May 24, 2019. https://flamboyanfoundation.org/ ourstories/revitalizing-through-the-arts-meet-y-no-habia-luz/. Y No Había Luz. “Circus of Absence, July 2018–Feb. 2019, the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture/Humboldt Park/3015 W Division Street/Chicago IL.” July 12, 2018. http://ynohabialuz.com/circus-of-absence-chicago/. Y No Había Luz. “De Diván y Temporal: Campechada 2013!! Homenaje a Rafael Tufiño.” October 1, 2013. http://ynohabialuz.com/campechada-2013/. Y No Había Luz. Cutendencia, 2006. April 18, 2010. http://ynohabialuz.com/ cutendencia/. Y No Había LuzDiego el ciego, 2013. April 13, 2013. http://ynohabialuz.com/diegoel-ciego/. Y No Había Luz. Fin del sueño, 2010. April 28, 2010. http://ynohabialuz.com/fin-delsueno/. Y No Había LuzRepertorio, 2018. Y No Había LuzEl retablo de Maese Pedro, 2016. February 15, 2016. http:// ynohabialuz.com/retablo-de-maese-pedro/.

9

Performing the revolution: Castro’s Cuba Marta M. Caminero-Santangelo University of Kansas

Prologue: Castro’s unexpected acting career? Long after Fidel Castro’s revolution had transformed from a historical event into a misnomer for a half-century-long regime, he continued to demon­ strate a profound understanding of the symbolic power of public perfor­ mance and the power of performance to consolidate an aura of revolutionary heroism. Many Cuban Americans are familiar with the apocryphal story/joke that Castro’s revolution would not have happened had Castro, a “genuine major-league pitching prospect” with a mean fast­ ball, been more effectively wooed by baseball scouts—a story Peter C. Bjarkman calls “baseball’s most outrageous myth” (31, 34). “It turns out,” Bjarkman comments irreverently, “that Fidel the ballplayer is even more of a marvelous propaganda creation… than Fidel the… revolutionary hero” (34). Yet a lesser-known (if similarly dubious) story about Castro’s “failed” career is perhaps more revealing of subsequent history: for a brief period, Castro was, according to some reports, an actor. To say such a thing requires immediate further qualification. Castro was not a “movie star,” even if he would later be called a “movie star dictator” (Madero, “Fidel Castro”). Rather, according to a small handful of incon­ spicuous and not-very-authoritative sources, in several movies in the 1940s Castro had bit roles as an (uncredited) extra—one of which was completely cut from the final production. The blog Forgotten Hollywood History tells the story like this: Havana in the 1940s and fifties was a hot spot for the Hollywood crowd. With its proximity to the United States, favorable exchange rate, rum, cigars and pretty women, it attracted both the film elite, as well as its hustlers. Jerry Beeker, a talent scout with Paramount, was vacationing in Havana when he spotted a tall, athletic, and still clean shaven Fidel Castro at a night club. Introducing himself, he gave the young Castro his card and invited him to the United States for a screen test…. Needing a Latin lover type to deliver a single line in the soon to be completed Production [of] Havana After Midnight, Fidel was cast as a DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-9

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Cuban gigolo. And his line, “Si Yanqui. Havana has the most beautiful and hot blooded women in the world. You’ll like it here.” (WJY) The irony in having Castro as actor utter a line so utterly complicit with the United States’ imperialist view of Cuba as a playground perhaps weighs in favor of the theory that this story is apocryphal, at least in some degree. The post goes on: When the studio told him that his line had been cut, he went to the office of film editor Barney Pockler and demanded to know why he had been left on the cutting room floor. For years, before his death, Pockler would tell this story. “This guy shows up in my editing bay, yelling about how Beeker had promised him he was going to be a movie star. I said, listen Ace. I called everyone Ace back then. It wasn’t my decision to cut your scene. The director looked at the dailies and decided you was a stiff. So snip, snip and you’re gone. End of story. When he got to the door, the little grease ball turned around and told me that he had always loved America, but not anymore, and that we was all going to regret it. I always figured that if we hadn’t cut the guys [sic] line, maybe there wouldn’t have been a Bay of Pigs. (WJY) The entire anecdote is repeated, in briefer form and without accreditation, in the chapter “History on the Cutting Room Floor” of The One Year Book of Amazing Stories: 365 Days of Seeing God’s Hand in Unlikely Places, issued by Tyndale, a Christian publishing house (Petterson). Of course, it makes it rather easier to tell this story that Castro’s supposed one-liner was cut from the final production, needing therefore no corroboration from the movie itself. With somewhat more credibility, Univision reported in 2015 that a film was being made by the Mexican Guild of Technical and Manual Workers in Cinematographic Production that in part covered Castro’s role as an extra in several Mexican films in the mid-1940s, including Mexican films such as Bathing Beauty (1944), Easy to Wed (1946), and Holiday in Mexico (1946) (Figure 9.1). The latter two films appear in Castro’s “filmography” on the webpage of IMDb, the film and television database, which labels him an “actor” and notes that his roles in those films were “uncredited” roles as extras (IMDb). Included in the Univision article is a movie still from Holiday in Mexico with a figure who was purportedly Castro in the background as a back-up dancer. The figure does bear a strong resemblance to Castro, though without his trademark beard. To be fair, Castro was supposedly clean-shaven at this time. (He would have been roughly seventeen in 1944, nineteen in 1946.) Univision further reported that “several movie critics and historians consulted by Univision were perplexed by the idea of imagining the prota­ gonist of the revolution as an extra in third-rate movies. ‘Even if that were

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Figure 9.1 This image is one of the stock movie stills from Holiday in Mexico, similar to the one used in the Univision article. The young Castro is purportedly a backup dancer (2nd from left in back row). (Photo credit: Licensed By: Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. All Rights Reserved.)

true, here (in Cuba) it will always be a lie, as you can imagine. And if that movie is made, they will never show it here…,’ was the email answer from a specialist at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry” (Lima). It is true that the timeline doesn’t quite fit—the movies he is claimed to have played bit roles in, whether in Hollywood or in Mexico, date in the midforties, but in 1942 Castro was going to school in Havana, first at the Jesuit Colegio de Belén at age fifteen (for what was the equivalent of high school), where a yearbook entry marked his years there as 1942 through 1945, and then studying law at the University of Havana from 1945 to 1950. During that period he married his first wife, Mirta Díaz-Balart, and their son, Fidelito, was born. There is no mention in some of Castro’s most prominent biographies—even those that spend substantial time focusing on his young life—of a detour in his schooling to Hollywood or Mexico for brief acting stints, although there is mention of travel to Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia in March and April of 1948 as one of a group of student leaders being recruited for a planned anti-imperialist Latin American stu­ dent congress (Bourne, 26–57; Hansen, 73–133; Quirk, 16–29). Indeed, one

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of his biographers explicitly notes that the latter was Castro’s first trip out of Cuba (Hansen, 111). He traveled briefly to the United States with Mirta in 1948; according to Jonathan Hansen’s biography, he and Mirta visited Miami, New York, and other stops in the Northeast (but not Hollywood) between October and December (Hansen, 126–28). Then he returned to Havana to finish his studies in 1950. He was imprisoned for almost two years after his unsuccessful attack on the Moncada Barracks in 1953 (which would later become known as the start of the 26th of July Movement) before being released and then exiling himself to Mexico for about a year and a half in 1955–56 (Bourne, 91–133; Hansen, 255–80; Quirk, 53–119). So it is hard to place the possibility of these roles within an actual chronology of Castro’s documented life. An additional note: I have not been able to verify through any independent sources that the planned Mexican documentary on Castro’s young years and misfired movie career was ever actually released, nor that the purported Hollywood film Havana after Midnight was actually released in the 1940s (though there is a 1941 film Week-End in Havana with Carmen Miranda, a Moonlight in Havana from 1942, and a 1949 Holiday in Havana with Desi Arnaz, all listed in the AFI Catalog), which would seem to cast further doubt on the truth of these claims. It would therefore, of course, be a stretch to make too much of what turned out to be a little anecdote of dubious authenticity about Castro’s life. There is no evidence that Castro was trained in acting, theater, or perfor­ mance, even in an experiential, learn-as-you-go sense, much less that he then found that training portable to his political career. But the anecdote (in either its historical or its mythical form), from two different strings of sources and pointing to somewhat different bit roles (in Mexico versus in Hollywood), does point, however tentatively, to Castro’s lifelong awareness and strategic deployment (the military metaphor is apt here) of perfor­ mance. Castro’s performances—public, televised, his own as well as those of the Cuban populace—were a crucial tool in solidifying his image as a living revolutionary hero whose staunch opposition to the United States’ political and economic domination masked and deflected a host of less savory per­ formances (less savory even from a progressive/leftist point of view). It is perhaps a given that a man who would give speeches for literally hours upon hours at a time relished performing in front of an audience (as, to draw an interesting analogy, forty-fifth US president Donald Trump—who had a rather longer performing career as host of the reality television show The Apprentice over fourteen seasons—relishes performing in front of massive rallies of his chanting supporters). Like Trump, Fidel Castro—called a “master of image and myth” and a paradigmatic example of a “charismatic personality” in US media coverage after his death in 2016 (DePalma; Madero, “Fidel Castro”), clearly manipulated performances, both his own and others’, in order to consolidate and preserve his hold on power. Though the supposed blip of a Hollywood career certainly doesn’t shed much light on this dynamic, perhaps his ongoing, highly performative,

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and interdependent relationship with US news media tells us more. As the Rumpus retrospective piece recalled, “It’s no secret that the US news media was long-fascinated by Castro, even before he seized power in 1959…. Castro was portrayed as a virile Latin lover, with a charismatic personality and an exotic masculinity.” Media coverage of Castro “contributed not only to his erotic image but also to a romantic vision of his revolution. But the comandante was just as fascinated by the journalists and their cameras. He became a celebrity and a media superstar… who commandeered attention even outside Cuba” (Madero, “Fidel Castro”). The Miami Herald recalled an early example of Castro’s playing to the US audience, when he visited Miami in 1955 to raise support and funds for his revolution, holding a rally that took place at what was then the Flagler Theater on Flagler Street in downtown Miami. Castro had recruited two Cuban “celebrities”—a politician and a radio personality—to appear with him at the theater, where he gave an impassioned speech in front of a portrait of José Martí. (He had not yet adopted his standard costume of military fatigues, however.) The article further reports that “after Miami, Castro traveled to… Key West, [where] he desperately wanted to speak at the historic San Carlos Institute on Duval Street from the same balcony where Cuban patriot Martí had spoken to Cuban cigar makers who worked there and who had fought for liberation from Spain decades earlier”; his request was denied (Chardy and Yanez). It is worth noting that the institute, which Martí purportedly called “la casa Cuba,” had served as a theater also, among other functions (Instituto San Carlos). Clearly, José Martí’s image and landmarks related to this historical figure were important props for Castro’s performances, linking him visually with the most widely known and admired hero of Cuban independence and creating, in essence, a narrative that Castro was the next Martí. The fact that no other ruler of the late twentieth century in the Western hemisphere has held onto power as long as he, with the single exception of Queen Elizabeth II, may perhaps serve as an indication of the effectiveness of these longstanding and ongoing performances (which is not to say that they went unchallenged). (Of note, billboard images of revolutionary—and dead—hero Che Guevara have been much more prominent around the streets of Cuba than those of the until recently living Fidel; Castro appar­ ently ceded the static public image to Che, preferring the vibrance, supposed “spontaneity,” ritual repetition, and mass engagement of the performance.) It is, further, of little doubt that Castro’s longstanding performances, for better or for worse, changed the Americas indelibly. In the estimation of the New York Times, “Mr. Castro’s revolution transformed Cuban society and had a longer-lasting impact throughout the region than that of any other twentieth-century Latin American insurrection, with the possible exception of the 1910 Mexican Revolution” (DePalma). Castro provided an inspira­ tional model for other leftist movements and leaders from Latin America; his regime instituted a five-decades-long standoff (eventually one of the last

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remaining relics of the Cold War) between Cuba and the United States, a standoff that once brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster and that created a diaspora of Cubans living abroad, in the United States and elsewhere. But Castro’s performances also generated performances in re­ sponse from the Cuban people—both performances solicited (if not man­ dated) by Castro and those that critiqued the state power he consolidated.

Act I: revolutionary performances: Castro’s regime Upon Castro’s death, the New York Times reported in its retrospective that Mr. Castro’s understanding of the power of images, especially on television, helped him retain the loyalty of many Cubans even during the harshest periods of deprivation and isolation when he routinely blamed America and its embargo for many of Cuba’s ills. And his mastery of words in thousands of speeches, often lasting hours, imbued many Cubans with his own hatred of the United States by keeping them on constant watch for an invasion—military, economic or ideological— from the north. (DePalma) This assessment underscores Castro’s theatrical talents—his ability to per­ form, before audiences of hundreds, the role of a revolutionary and oppo­ sitional hero, the David to the United States’ Goliath, even long after Castro himself had become the source and emblem of longstanding state power rather than of any antihegemonic or truly “revolutionary” (if by that is meant counterstate) impulse. A revolution that holds power for over half a century can no longer really be called a revolution; it is just the government in power. Indeed, any would-be “revolutions” against Castro’s state were ruthlessly suppressed, as I will shortly discuss. Nonetheless, he knew how to play the part masterfully, from costume to script to symbols and even to religious trappings. A quick Google search for images of Castro pulls up a wealth of images perhaps notable for their lack of variety: in all of the twenty or so first hits, Castro is dressed in the green military uniform in which he was virtually always seen in public. The con­ sistency of the public image earned him the “best dressed” designation from People magazine in 1984 (Madero, “Fidel Castro”). As one article appearing online on The Rumpus notes, “Throughout his life as Cuba’s dictator, and with few exceptions, Castro wore only the olive green military uniform that seduced many leftist youths, who saw the Cuban dictator as a symbol of constant rebellion against the US empire” (Madero, “Fidel Castro”). Conservative commentator George Will made a similar observation in the Los Angeles Times in 1977, noting that Castro had “mastered the symbols of heroism,” including the “green fatigues that he wore in the heroic fight to replace the old dictator. The fatigues are… a symbol of romantic origins [and] express reverence for the masses” (Will).

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As Richard Schechner has succinctly explained, “A performance takes place as action, interaction, and relation” (Schechner, 30); Castro’s public performances were always and inevitably about interaction (with the crowds, the Cuban people) and about building a sense of “relation,” of solidarity and support. Surely one of the most memorable images from Castro’s many public performances was his victory speech to Cuban crowds after his successful march into Havana in 1959, overturning then-dictator Fulgencio Batista. During his speech, which was televised at the time and photographed for posterity, doves were released and landed on and near Castro himself (in his fatigues), where they remained for the duration of the speech (Figure 9.2).

Figure 9.2 A dove lands on Castro’s shoulder during his first speech in Havana, to thousands of Cubans. The dove has been interpreted as a sign of provi­ dence as well as a connection between Castro and Santería. (Photo credit: Flip Schulke Archives/Corbis Premium Historical via Getty Images).

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Clearly this was a savvy staging with a powerful visual value, but it also had a strong relational value. Scholar Ivor L. Miller notes that in Cuban Santeria, a religion derived from the Yoruba people brought to Cuba as slaves, a white dove represents the divinity Obatalá, a divine king who molds humans from clay in heaven…. Many Cubans read it as evidence of Castro’s selection by supernatural forces. The spectacle of white doves in Castro’s speech is one in a long history of examples in which Caribbean leaders publicly use symbols from local religions. Coded performances in the Caribbean political arena [are often] geared to the local population by using icons from their religious practices. Because these symbols often derive from secret religions, their use dramatically implies… a leader’s ties to the local population…. Many practitioners do not verbally announce their participation in secret religions, but demonstrate it through the use of elaborate symbolism. (Miller, 30) It matters little, as Miller points out, whether Castro actually was a prac­ titioner of Santeria; what matters (certainly for the purposes of this argu­ ment, at least) is the possibility that he chose his symbols in order to suggest his status as a practitioner to the Cuban populace: “One ramification was that some Cubans began to interpret the actions of Fidel Castro and the symbols used by his regime in ways completely divergent from his spoken discourses,” including, of course, his official disavowals of religion to con­ form to a Soviet Communist agenda (Miller, 43, 36). Even Wayne Smith, who was for three years the chief of the US Interests Section in Cuba, confirmed in his own analysis of the speech both that Cuban adherents of Santeria would very likely have arrived at this conclusion and that the doves, in any event, signaled divine selection: “To the millions of Cubans who practiced or at least had a healthy respect for Santeria, … the sign was unmistakable…. He was El Eligido (the Chosen One)…. Even to those who ignored Santeria, the dove was taken as a sign that Fidel had been chosen to lead the nation” (Smith). Thus, brilliant staging contributed the illusion of divine ordination, in the absence of any democratic political process. According to the New Republic, in September 1960, almost two years after ascending to power, Castro visited New York for the United Nations General Assembly. In a prior visit to New York, Castro had shown up at photo-op landmarks, from the Bronx Zoo to Yankee Stadium, where he was reportedly “fawned over like a celebrity” (Cohen). But the 1960 trip was marked by his dramatic exit from the Shelburne Hotel in Manhattan, where he felt he and his entourage had been snubbed (by one report, he had “staged the drama”). Castro and his delegation relocated to the Hotel Theresa in Harlem (Figure 9.3), where he then executed yet another per­ formance of theatrical proportions, welcoming foreign dignitaries as well as Black leaders, including Malcolm X and the then-president of New York’s

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Figure 9.3 “Fidel Castro Entertains in Harlem” during his visit to the United States for the United Nations General Assembly; Castro integrated his experi­ ence in Harlem into his speech to the UN as part of a general critique of US imperialism. (Photo credit: Hulton Archive via Getty Images.)

NAACP, to the hotel (Cohen). Castro delivered rousing remarks to the United Nations about the connections between anti-imperialism, antic­ apitalism, and race relations in the United States, linking his own experience with disrespect during his visit to US imperialism as a whole, beginning by noting that his Cuban delegation Figure 9.3 had to undergo degrading and humiliating treatment, including eviction from the hotel in which we were living…. When we were forced to leave … and

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came to the United National Headquarters while efforts were being made to find accommodation for us, a hotel, a humble hotel of this city, a Negro hotel in Harlem, offered to rent us rooms…. Once in Harlem… the slander and defamation campaigns began. They began spreading the news all over the world that the Cuban delegation had lodged in a brothel. For some humble hotel in Harlem, a hotel inhabited by Negroes of the United States, must obviously be a brothel…. If we were the kind of men they try to depict at all costs, imperialism would not have lost all hope, as it did long ago, of somehow buying or seducing us. But… they should at least realize that imperialist financial capital is a prostitute that cannot seduce us. (Castro) From there, Castro went on to declare that “the problem of Cuba” was that “Cuba was a colony of the United States” after its independence from Spain. Thus he linked Cuban liberation from the domination of the United States to Latin American historical struggles for independence from Spain and both of these to equal rights efforts in the 1960s. The performance was yet another that solidified Castro’s developing and carefully constructed role, not just as a Cuban revolutionary, but as a world revolutionary hero, fighting in solidarity with the struggle against racial oppression everywhere and in line with a legacy of independence move­ ments. The carefully crafted image of the heroic young David battling the Goliath of persecution by First World powers and fighting for the mar­ ginalized on a variety of fronts belied some of the realities of what was actually happening in Cuba—realities that also had everything to do with performances, though of a far more violent sort.

Act II: “Revolutionary” performances: mass demonstrations and the state Of course, Castro was not only engaging in political performance: he was also deeply invested in orchestrating large-scale performances of support among the Cuban people. And here, it is important to remind ourselves that even unin­ tentional performances can be performances nonetheless; in Richard Schechner’s concise definition, a performance is a “twice behaved behavior”—that is, “Any action that is framed, presented, highlighted, or displayed” (Schechner 28, 2). Any rally or protest, of course, is meant to “display,” through certain ritualized and repeated actions (e.g., gathering in crowds, marching, carrying signs, waving flags, vigorously chanting slogans), support for or against a certain action, belief, policy, or piece of legislation. The crowds are the “(social) actors” in a perfor­ mance, “follow[ing] the implicit rules of the event, governed as it is by conven­ tions and norms” (Taylor, Performance, 19). In Diana Taylor’s more elaborate explanation, performance is an ongoing repertoire of gestures and behaviors that get reenacted or reactivated again and again, often without us being aware of them….

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We can see how Castro deployed crowd performances to transmit social “knowledge” (conviction regarding the socialist and revolutionary en­ terprise) and to solidify a sense of Cuban identity in opposition to enemies both internal and external. In a very early example from the regime, Castro orchestrated a rally in Havana in January 1959 in the plaza that fronted the presidential palace to convey popular support, in the face of international critique for the hard-line approach his regime was taking toward former government officials and supporters of the deposed dictator Fulgencio Batista (an approach that included summary executions by firing squad against the paredón). Archival photographs depict “demonstrators hold[ing] signs reading Impunidad—no! (‘No mercy!’) and Al paredón (‘To the ex­ ecution wall’). A university student wears a hangman’s noose and a smile” (Gugliotta). During the rally, seeking a visual show of support for the new government’s course of action, Castro “turn[ed] to the crowd and sa[id], ‘If you agree with what we’re doing, raise your hand’”; a photograph captures Castro looking on as a sea of people raise their hands. Later, scholar Lillian Guerra notes, Castro’s calling for shows of hands at such rallies “became officially a substitute for electoral voting,” a (more than) twice-behaved behavior that was a visual (if solicited) demonstration of support; “Fidel realized the visual dimensions of his power” (Gugliotta). As Guerra further explains in Visions of Power in Cuba: Fidel himself authored a foundational aspect of the Revolution’s grand narrative when he declared the million-person mass rally a form of “direct democracy” comparable to that of ancient Greece. In doing so, he not only made unity behind his vision a basic requirement of being a revolutionary but also participation in rallies—rather than other forms of assembly—the quintessential proof and the vehicle for achieving unity…. The substitution of mass rallies for electoral process and legislative bodies achieved overwhelming support in 1959. (39) Thus visual and public demonstration of the will of the Cuban people through performance—under public pressure as well as state surveillance and scrutiny—was made to supplant actual democratic processes. As the regime went on, expressions of populist support took the form of “moral purges” or “acts of repudiation” against those who were considered to be “antirevolutionary” for reasons of politics, sexuality, artistic expres­ sion, or the simple desire to leave Cuba. According to some sources,

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the acts of repudiation became a type of ritual organized by the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs). This institution was designed by Fidel Castro at the beginning of the 1960s to ensure more efficient political control in neighborhoods. The committees surveilled subjects who were considered enemies of the Revolution. (Madero, “Here, Everyone’s Got Huevos, Mister!,” 251) César Bermúdez, one of the Cuban exiles interviewed in the 1984 doc­ umentary film Mauvaise Conduite (Improper Conduct), describes assemblies of the Communist Youth (UJC) in the 1960s at which a list of names of those to be subjected to “moral purges” would be read, and then those whose names were on the list (often in attendance) would be subjected to gross humiliation and name calling—a clear instance of political theater. In Guerra’s recounting, Cuba’s two largest youth organizations, the Communist Youth and FEU [Students’ Federation], spearheaded an unprecedented three year-long campaign of depuraciones (purges) through public trials of hundreds of students and the distribution of homophobic literature to encourage social repudiation of “the little sick ones” by peers. Announced on a near daily basis over campus audio systems, depuraciones required all students enrolled in a given department to attend a mass assembly where a “jury”… announced the accused and called witnesses to testify from the floor. Because defending the accused might result in similar charges being filed against a witness, these trials resembled staged dramas [with] a unanimous vote of guilty…. FEU and the UJC decided not to make any distinction in the procedures for purging homosexuals from those typically used against accused counterrevolutionaries. (247) In this manner, the mass participation in depuraciones replaced judicial process, much as mass rallies replaced democratic process. One former student activist “compared [the] purges to the… heroic assault on Batista’s Presidential Palace” (247); that is, publicly demonstrating the denouncement of so-called homosexuals was, in itself, the performance of revolutionary fe­ alty. In Guerra’s analysis, “students could now become self-assigned gov­ ernment informers, ‘heroically’ selecting from among their peers who was and who was not qualified to be a revolutionary” (248). In an editorial in El Mundo, the targeting of “homosexuals” (of all walks of life, not just students) was labeled “Revolutionary social hygiene” (quoted in Guerra, 246). Throughout Castro’s regime, such mass demonstrations of support—often referred to as “acts of repudiation” or “actos de repudio,” defined by Amnesty International as “government orchestrated demon­ strations, usually carried out in front of the homes of government critics, and attended by government supporters, state officials and law enforcement agencies” (Amnesty International)—became a staple performance in

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support of the revolution. Among the more prominent acts of repudiation were those organized at the time of the Mariel boat lift in 1980, with Cubans excoriating their neighbors who had expressed an intent to leave the island. In response to the occupation of the Peruvian Embassy in April by Cubans demanding asylum, Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party in Cuba, encouraged Cubans to protest the asylum seekers, publishing chants and slogans such as “Get out! Show your feet, worms, and we’ll chop them off!”; “My city, so beautiful and clean without lumpens or queens!”; and “Traitors and opportunists, you’d sell your soul for a pair of blue jeans!” (Madero, “Here, Everyone’s Got Huevos, Mister!,” 244–46). At one massive protest outside the embassy on April 30, witnesses put the pro­ testing crowd in the hundreds of thousands, while the government estimated a million, half of Havana’s actual population at the time (Simons). As Madero further explains, “It was not only state propaganda that fueled these acts; they required the coordinated efforts of political and mass or­ ganizations…. [They] sought to intimidate and punish those who were leaving while sending a clear signal to discourage others who wished to do the same…. Party militants and members of the communist youth were the first to be compelled to carry out acts of repudiation before the practice became more generalized” (“Here, Everyone’s Got Huevos, Mister!,” 252). In one eyewitness’s recorded testimonio, writer and journalist María Elena Cruz Varela (who went into exile in the United States) compared the actos de repudio, to which she herself was subjected, to other acts of mob rule in history, such as the US lynchings—an interesting if overstated comparison in that both used mob performance to enact terror. (Indeed, another eye­ witness, Tony Pinelli, who admits to having participated in an acto, speci­ fically argued that they were a form of state terrorism. Cruz Varela explained that the actos de repudio called upon the “masses” or the “pueblo” (the people as a whole) “to attack all those who exhibit divergent opinions, or different opinions, contrary opinions, to the official opinions of the system” (Radio Televisión Martí; my translation). Amado Gil, a reporter for Radio Televisión Martí, recounts how, when he was a university student, buses would be parked alongside the university to transport students to acts of repudiation, and the students were, for all effects and purposes, obligated to attend (Radio Televisión Martí). In the words of another eyewitness, Esperanza Torres, “If you were a Party supporter or in the Youth organi­ zation you had to go [to an act of repudiation] or else they would criticize you in the meetings and might even penalize you. At my workplace, not one person ever said no to an act of repudiation” (quoted in Madero, “Here, Everyone’s Got Huevos, Mister!,” 253). That is to say that if citizens relied on their affiliations to the Communist Party to be safe from harassment (if not prosecution), those affiliations also required—of them, first and foremost—performances that demonstrated their allegiance to the Communist Party and to Castro’s regime. But the net cast by acts of re­ pudiation stretched wider than political dissidents: children or other family

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members were subjected to these acts because of their parents’ or siblings’ desire to leave Cuba (Radio Televisión Martí). The acts of repudiation were one of the performative strategies used to significant effect during Castro’s rule in order to demonstrate continuing popular support, suppress dissent, and influence ideological adherence; the actos de repudio of 1980 also in­ extricably linked nonnormative sexuality to “antirevolutionary” allegiance and both of these to criminality (Madero, “Here, Everyone’s Got Huevos, Mister!,” 262).

Act III: queer performances It might not be too much of a stretch, within the context of a regime that was particularly adept in its use of performance as a tool of both state control and ideological training, that oppositional (not to say “counter­ revolutionary”) expression has also often taken the form of performance, both more and less formal, more and less deliberately “staged.” Notably, the victims of the Castro regime’s early purges were also identified by their detractors through their own performances: “In 1963, Fidel originally launched [an ongoing] homophobic campaign with the theory that young men who wore tight pants in imitation of Elvis Presley were ‘feminine’ counterrevolutionaries” (Guerra, 246). Bermudez notes that the purges often worked by identifying people on the basis of how they dressed or how they did their hair—this was part of the street theater of the revolution. Such persecutions were “easy,” keeping people “entertained.” Accusations fo­ cused on the social performances of others, often implying that the targeted victims were “homosexual”: “He said [something] to me… and gave me a suspicious look the other day” or “The other day when I shook his hand he held my hand a little longer than necessary” (Mauvaise Conduite, 1984). One targeted individual described how, when he was arrested, he was told by the military man who was interrogating him that since he belonged to the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), he must be a “faggot,” because all writers and artists were “faggots.” The implication was that artistic ex­ pression was a sign or performance of nonheteronormative sexuality. Then he was asked to walk around the room; after he had done so, the military man said, “See, now we are going to make a man out of you”—by which, commented the writer, “apparently, he meant we are going to change the way you walk” (Mauvaise Conduite; my translation). Again, a series of things were equated: walking in a certain way with sexuality, non­ heteronormative sexuality with “antirevolutionary” sentiments, and “anti­ revolutionary” sentiments with creative expression. The political could be discerned, in other words, through performances seemingly having nothing to do with politics. It is interesting to invoke here José Esteban Muñoz’s analogous con­ struction of queerness as future-facing utopian projection and wish in Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. Queerness, Muñoz

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writes, “is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing…. We can glimpse the world proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic, [which] frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (1). Intriguingly, then, Muñoz has also aligned queerness, artistic expression, and hegemonic critique; proposing “forward-dawning futurity” or the tit­ ular “utopia” presupposes that the present is something less than utopic, that it is “not enough.” Further, Muñoz understands “utopian performa­ tivity” quite specifically as “a mode of possibility” that is “imbued with a sense of potentiality”; that is to say, performance/performativity is the pri­ vileged mode by which to look toward a more utopian future (99). One of Cuba’s foremost novelists, Reinaldo Arenas—who was arrested in Cuba for charges related to his behaviors as a gay man, left during the Mariel exodus in 1980, and eventually committed suicide in the United States (where he was dying of AIDS)—obviously viewed his own queer performances as a rebuttal to state power and hegemony. He noted that Castro’s regime worked as much through the suppression of particular performances as through the orchestration of others: “It was logical for Fidel Castro to persecute us, not to let us fuck, and to try to suppress any public display of the life force” (90); against the prohibition of particular “public” performances, then, Arenas asserted his own (very public) per­ formance: “I scream, therefore I exist” (285), which included the public assertion/performance of his sexuality, as well as the publication of his novels.

Act IV: performance art Sujatha Fernandes has argued forcefully in Cuba Represent! that Cuban art and cultural production maintained a critical stance through which state dogma and practices could be challenged by—among other things—performance arts: “Cuban cultural producers such as filmmakers, rap musicians, and art collectives do retain a sense of themselves as interlocutors within a public sphere [and] make a conscious attempt to create a space of dialogue and debate within the arts in Cuba” (14). This space Fernandes terms “artistic public spheres.” Fernandes means to capture, through this term, the active role of the audience: “critical cultural forms envision members of the public as producers or participants, in contrast to mass-mediated forms of publicity, which construct the public as spectators or consumers” (14). In other words, the very “public” that was, for half a century, so instrumental in the active public performances that Castro encouraged and demanded is also the imagined change agent in artistic public spheres, performing in perhaps more parodic or critical ways. One Cuban art critic, Wendy Navarro, has labeled as “public art” “experiences of performances in urban space that aim to confront the political, social, and institutional order” (Fernandes, 138; Navarro, 47, quoted in Fernandes)—suggesting that public performances hold

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particular potential for being oppositional and for offering an alternative to state-sanctioned art sponsored by UNEAC, the official arts organization of Cuba. As Fernandes explains, “One of the main features of public art in Cuba were the ‘happenings,’ which varied from carefully staged performances to improvised, spontaneous events” (138). In one challenging performance in 1987, an event organized by UNEAC was interrupted by Grupo Provisional, a young artist collective, members of which turned the event into a parody of an awards show: instead of trophies, skeletons branded with the word “artist” were the prize for the so-called winners (Fernandes, 138; Camnitzer, quoted in Fernandes). In another incident, protesting the closing of an artistic exhibition in 1989 because it included a mocking portrait of Castro, artists arranged a baseball game at the José A. Echeverría Stadium (where events required of­ ficial permission for the use of the space, but baseball games did not); a manifesto was then read out loud at the “game” decrying the subordination of the intellectual to the state (Valdés Figueroa, cited in Fernandes, 139). In 1990, students formed the group ENEMA, which “decided to work with their bodies in performance.” Another group, the Department of Public Interventions (DIP), planned to work in open spaces far from institutionalized art spaces (such as galleries) that were more under state control (Fernandes, 147). While the 1980s saw a relative relaxing of state censorship and a corre­ sponding burgeoning of more critical performance art, the early to mid1990s (with the onset of the Special Period, during which Cuba’s economy suffered gravely in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution) were a period of renewed ideological retrenchment (Fernandes, 139–42). In the late 1990s, artists formed groups and collectives intended “to revitalize the po­ litical thrust of art against the restrictions placed on artists.” One artist noted that “we propose somehow to rescue the spirit of the 1980s, this transgressive spirit, committed to social contexts, committed to the necessity of speaking out” (Fernandes, 147; René Francisco Rodríguez, quoted in Fernandes). By the new millennium, performance artists such as Tania Bruguera, who grew up in Cuba and has had her work shown in both Cuba and in the United States, were gaining international attention. In the 2009 Havana Biennial, Bruguera exhibited a performance piece, Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (performed at the Wifredo Lam Center of Contemporary Art), which encouraged Cubans to air their thoughts—of whatever ideological persuasion—at an open mic; “some audience members used their time to voice their support for the Cuban government; others used it to decry its injustices; one participant simply cried for the entire minute” (Ibarguen, 12). A dove had been placed on the shoulder of each participant by actors dressed in military uniform, echoing if not parodying Castro’s original and heavily symbolic speech. In 2014, Bruguera planned a reprisal of the piece, now tied to the #YoTambiénExijo (or “I too demand”) movement, spurred by demands she made “as a Cuban” in a 2014 letter to Raúl Castro, who had

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succeeded his brother Fidel as president of Cuba in 2008 (Ibarguen, 10). Bruguera planned for the Cuban public to come up to an open mic in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución, to express whatever they wished; as ex­ plained by Bruguera, “The idea is to get together at La Plaza on December the 30th at 15:00 in order to speak and discuss peacefully about what concerns us in these days, to be there and let others know of what we think and our reasons for it, in an atmosphere of tolerance and respect” (Sutton). As with other performance art, Bruguera focused on the audience as both participants and active producers of the piece’s artistic meaning, rather than as mere spectators. Bruguera was never permitted to complete the perfor­ mance piece, however, as she was arrested before it could be staged in the plaza (Sutton). But in this way, the nonperformance of #YoTambiénExijo achieved perhaps even greater symbolic impact, since its “significance [lay] in its public protest of the political situation in Cuba by creating a subversive space of free discussion” (Ibarguen, 4), and yet the Cuban authorities did not, in fact, allow public protest or free discussion to take place. While none of the examples of performance art that I have reviewed here—individually or even collectively—have had the cumulative and transformative power of Castro’s fifty years of performance as guerrilla revolutionary hero, nor of the performances of the masses that he orche­ strated and “directed” in order to create powerful visual demonstrations of strong public support that were viewed across the world, they do suggest that the strongly performative culture of postrevolutionary Cuba could cut both ways and that artists were eager to capitalize on the Cuban popula­ tion’s receptiveness to dynamic, expressive, bodily, and participatory forms of art.

Act V: oppositional demonstrations and the state(s) The Cuban populace could cut both ways as well—shouting, “¡Al paredón!” in the early purges, but also storming the Peruvian Embassy in 1980 to seek asylum. Indeed, the latter could also be termed a performance, a “twicebehaved behavior,” in that Cubans were well aware of preceding attempts to seek asylum by storming the Peruvian and Venezuelan embassies (Verdon) and were thus performing a collective action that was in the process of es­ tablishing its own understood codes and conventions (managing to get into an embassy would get you asylum). Years later, in 1994, a public uprising in Cuba in which protesters at the Malecón (sea wall) shouted, “Freedom” and “Down with Fidel” into video cameras—thus intentionally displaying their performances—led to another mass exodus of 35,000. The protest became known as the Maleconazo (Gamez Torres). On a final note, it is both ironic and fitting that the strong tradition of political performance cultivated under Castro was a legacy that the Cuban

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exiles fleeing his regime brought with them to the United States. In perhaps the most remarkable historical example, Cuban Americans in Miami used the well-established conventions of protest to perform tumultuous protests following the raid in 2000 that took six-year-old Elián González, the only survivor on a raft that had fled Cuba for the United States, out of the home of his Cuban exile relatives to return him to the custody of his father in Cuba. The resulting protest was a vivid example of the “repertoire” (as distinct from the “archive”) in Diana Taylor’s well-known formulation (The Archive and the Repertoire); while news cameras and newspaper and ma­ gazine articles certainly captured the conflict and the protests in full, the event was felt viscerally by Miami Cubans. One witness, a child of Cuban exiles, explained in retrospect, “Something snapped. I have a seven-year-old boy. And I see what this six-year-old boy is going through, and that brought me to tears a number of times, when I see my boy and how innocent he is.” Another commented, “When I saw that child, I realized that that child could have easily been a younger brother of mine, the kid across the street…. It could have been me, you know” (Bikel). As the crowds protested in the street (notably, Flagler Street, where many years before Castro had made his speech [Forero and Barringer]), they were once again “follow[ing] the implicit rules” of protests against the state, “gov­ erned as [they are] by conventions and norms” (Taylor, Performance, 19) (Figure 9.4). Protesters waved both Cuban and US flags (Clary)—tapping into nationalist forms of symbolism in ways quite similar to Castro and attesting through these physical/symbolic acts to dual emotional allegiances and at­ tachments even while feeling that the governments of both countries had failed them. There were reports of at least one US flag burning as well and of other fires (Clary). The literally enflamed protests attested to Cuban exiles’ response to Elián’s forced return to Cuba, documenting through the repertoire of phy­ sical protest what was felt by the group as a personal form of trauma.

Epilogue Castro may not have aspired to be an actor any more than a baseball player; but he clearly had a calling to be a performer, and he performed successfully throughout the half century of his regime. The two leaders who followed him—his brother Raúl and now, most recently, Miguel Díaz-Canel—have not shown nearly the savvy statesmanship of symbolism, charisma, physical presentation, oratory, and passionate frenzy that were Fidel’s trademark. This is not to say, of course, that crowd performances in Cuba have ended. Indeed, as recently as 2018, human rights reports on Cuba were still finding that, “according to independent reports, state-orchestrated ‘acts of re­ pudiation’ directed against independent civil society groups and

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Figure 9.4 Cuban-Americans protest the removal of Elián González by force from his Miami relatives and repatriation to Cuba, waving both Cuban and US flags. (Photo credit: Miami Herald/Hulton Archive via Getty Images.)

individuals… were organized to prevent meetings or to intimidate partici­ pants publicly” (US Embassy in Cuba). And, as we have seen, anti-Castro protests have occurred both in Cuba and in the United States. Perhaps it is fair to say that both Fidel Castro’s performances and those that were per­ formed (in one way or another) in response to Castro have, collectively, indelibly changed the Americas.

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Lima, Lioman. “Fidel Castro: From Movie Extra to Super Star (and Vice Versa).” Univision, Noticias, October 21, 2015. https://www.univision.com/noticias/fidelcastro-from-movie-extra-to-super-star-and-vice-versa. Madero, Abel Sierra. “Fidel Castro: The Playboy Comandante.” The Rumpus, November 24, 2017. https://therumpus.net/2017/11/fidel-castro-the-playboy-comandante/. Madero, Abel Sierra. “‘Here, Everyone’s Got Huevos, Mister!’: Nationalism, Sexuality, and Collective Violence in Cuba During the Mariel Exodus.” In The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980, edited by Michael J. Bustamante and Jennifer L. Lambe. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Mauvaise Conduit [Improper Conduct]. Directed by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal, written by Néstor Almendros. France 2, Les Films du Losange, 1984. Miller, Ivor L. “Religious Symbolism in Cuban Political Performance.” TDR: The Drama Review 44, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 30–55. Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Navarro, Wendy. “Transfiguraciones elásticas: Tránsito y disidencia en el arte público contemporáneo.” Artecubano: Revista de Artes Visuales 2 (2000): 46–56. Petterson, Robert. The One Year Book of Amazing Stories: 365 Days of Seeing God’s Hand in Unlikely Places. Chicago: Tyndale, 2018. Quirk, Robert E. Fidel Castro. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993. Radio Televisión Martí. “Todos gritaban, un documental sobre los actos de repudio en Cuba.” August 9, 2020. https://www.radiotelevisionmarti.com/a/todos-gritabanun-documental-sobre-los-actos-de-repudio-en-cuba/270216.html. Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: An Introduction. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006. Simons, Marlise. “Massive Protest against Refugees Arouses Havana.” Washington Post, April 20, 1980. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/04/20/massiveprotest-against-refugees-arouses-havana/4bd36f48-d5ce-4692-9fa5-5aeaaa1dcfaa/. Smith, Wayne S. Portrait of Cuba. Atlanta, GA: Turner, 1991. Sutton, Benjamin. “Artist Tania Bruguera Allegedly Detained in Cuba Over Public Performance.” Hyperallergic, December 31, 2014. https://hyperallergic.com/172363/ artist-tania-bruguera-allegedly-detained-in-cuba-over-public-performance/. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Taylor, Diana. Performance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. US Embassy in Cuba. Cuba 2018 Human Rights Report. March 13, 2019. https:// cu.usembassy.gov/cuba-human-rights-report-2018/. Valdés Figueroa, Eugenio. “Trajectories of a Rumor: Cuban Art in the Postwar Period.” In Art Cuba: The New Generation, edited by Holly Block. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001, 17–25. Verdon, Lexie. “Thousands in Cuba Ask Peruvian Refuge.” Washington Post, April 7, 1980. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/04/07/thousandsin-cuba-ask-peruvian-refuge/987ab70f-3cbe-4ad3-afcd-a6fcb9152d93/. Will, George F. “Castro’s Revolutionary Gamble.” Los Angeles Times, March 10, 1977. https://www.proquest.com/hnplatimes/docview/158288309/D660ADD03654266PQ/ 1?accountid=14556. WJY. “Fidel Castro, Movie Star.” Forgotten Hollywood History blog, July 5, 2009. http://forgottenhollywoodhistory.blogspot.com/2009/07/fidel-castro-movie-star.html.

10 The queer/muxe performance of disappearance: Lukas Avendaño’s butterfly utopia Antonio Prieto Stambaugh Universidad Veracruzana, Mexico

The following pages move from loss and outrage to solidarity and hope against all odds. These emotions inform the recent struggle undertaken by indigenous artist Lukas Avendaño in the search for his brother Bruno Alonso, who vanished on May 10, 2018, joining more than 70,000 people who have been forcibly disappeared in Mexico during the past couple of decades. Since then, Avendaño has used his skills as a muxe (or “two-spirit”) performance artist to raise awareness of this plight and literally hold hands with those who wish to silently join him in a queer refusal to accept dis­ appearance. Avendaño’s work is part of the ongoing drama faced by thousands of families in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, as well as the ways conceptual and performance artists have been addressing the crisis of murdered or disappeared people since the dirty wars of the Cold War era. For example, Mexican groups of politically informed conceptual artists, like Proceso Pentágono and Taller de Investigación Plástica, addressed the problem of the disappeared through a variety of public actions carried out between 1973 and 1979. What is notable about Avendaño’s performance is the way he queers the repertoire of activist demonstrations to demand justice for the families of the disappeared. His work ties in with the recent work by other young queer artivists1 in Mexico, notably Felipe Osornio (aka “Lechedevirgen Trimegisto”) and Lía García, who denounce crimes against women and queer people. As Diana Taylor notes regarding the Argentinian Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo), these artists are transitioning from identity politics to coalition politics (Taylor 1994, 301), a move that marks a turn in relation to international LGBTQ+ per­ formance strategies. In Mexico, queer artists and activists are now building alliances with diverse grassroots organizations demanding an end to gender violence and the impunity of organized crime.

The political performance of muxeidad Lukas Avendaño was born in 1977 into the Zapotec community of Oaxaca, Mexico, and has recently gained international recognition for work that DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-10

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addresses issues of queerness, class, and ethnicity. Elsewhere, I argue how in Réquiem para un alcaraván (Requiem for a curlew, 2012), Avendaño ar­ ticulates a queer performatic intervention of gendered nationalistic re­ presentations (such as the Tehuana dresses worn by Frida Kahlo) and simultaneously embodies/interrogates the identity of muxes from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Prieto Stambaugh, 2014). Muxes are often referred to as the “indigenous third sex,” but Avendaño is quick to point out that they have a much more complex subject position: “The muxe only exists within a collective, cultural ecosystem that embraces femininity and mas­ culinity in a series of interrelated practices” (Avendaño 2020b). The artist prefers to speak about muxeidad (muxeity) as a way of carrying oneself in relation to the community, gracefully participating in social and ritual life. The muxe notion of grace is expressed as guenda, a Zapotec concept that alludes not only to a personal esthesis of everyday life but also to specific commitments with the larger social body (Avendaño, 2019) (Figure 10.1). In 2018, Avendaño’s community was shattered by the forceful dis­ appearance of his brother Bruno Alonso, who was visiting his hometown in Tehuantepec and scheduled to attend a Mother’s Day gathering on the evening of May 10. Bruno never showed up, and for over two years, his family experienced the nightmare that thousands of people in Mexico who search for their loved ones experience as they carry out actions to demand justice. As I mention to the epilogue, Bruno’s body was finally found in a clandestine grave, and returned to his family in November of 2020. In the following pages, I address Lukas’s2 struggle to trace the where­ abouts of his brother, focusing particularly on his public performances Buscando a Bruno (Searching for Bruno) and Llamado a la autoridad (A call to the authorities), which were presented before government buildings and museums in Mexico and abroad. In a recent interview (Avendaño 2020a), Lukas explained to me that he considers his performances a means of slowly advancing on the road toward justice. But whatever is achieved on that terrain necessarily calls for at least two other fronts of action: legal battle and media attention. Thus, visibility is only a means to an end: to find Bruno and demand that the government make effective its mandate to end largescale criminal impunity. Lukas’s work is not only changing the ways muxe and other indigenous people are perceived in mainstream Mexico (as ignorant, exotic objects of contemplation). I argue he is also gesturing toward a queer utopia where political, aesthetic, and sexual dissidence merge, where violence and im­ punity fail to destroy hope. What kind of disappearance does Lukas perform? His public interven­ tions draw from an existing repertoire of political activism in Latin America since the Cold War, which demands governments investigate forced dis­ appearances and make accountable those who have perpetrated these crimes. Lukas’s activism stands out for its aesthetics, which draws from queer and muxe sensibilities, as I discuss below. Like many others in recent

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Figure 10.1 Lukas Avendaño in Réquiem para un alcaraván, Xalapa, Veracruz, México, 2012. Photo courtesy of Antonio Prieto.

years, Lukas appropriates performative tactics used by the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (mothers of the disappeared) in Argentina and also in Mexico, where the Eureka Committee, headed by Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, has been fighting for the rights of political prisoners and the disappeared. Both groups have staged public protests since the late 1970s, during the socalled dirty wars waged against political dissidents by repressive regimes. They share similar forms of marching in public plazas or in front of gov­ ernment offices carrying pictures of their disappeared children, siblings, or partners. As Taylor has argued, the Madres in Argentina enacted a gendered political performance, capitalizing on the codified roles of the Latin American “mother” as both nurturing and suffering, while at the same time

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subverting the patriarchal ideal of the submissive home-bound woman be­ cause they occupied the plazas as empowered and oppositional public fig­ ures: “Through their bodies, they wanted to show the absence/presence of all those who had disappeared without a trace, without leaving a body…. Instead of the military’s ahistorical forgetting, the Madres inscribed the time and dates of the disappearances. Instead of dismembering, remembering” (Taylor 1994, 269). Lukas’s performance is gendered in a different way, displaying a defiant trans corporality, both feminine and masculine, which goes against the grain of the homophobic public sphere in Mexico. The artist, who is a universitytrained anthropologist,3 also deliberately deploys ethnicity, dressing in Tehuana attire as a way to, in his own words, “accentuate my origins in the Tehuantepec Isthmus of Oaxaca, and accentuate my particular muxeidad” (Avendaño 2018). The move can be read as “strategic essentialism,”4 but it also derived from a number of practical considerations. More than a month after his brother’s disappearance, Lukas found himself depressed because of the blatant indifference and inaction on the part of the Naval Ministry (Bruno’s former employer) and the local public prosecutor’s office (Ministerio Público), responsible for investigating crimes against citizens, where he had immediately notified authorities of the situation. Because of these pressing circumstances, he had considered canceling an engagement to perform Réquiem para un alcaraván in Barcelona during the month of June. However, as the artist told me, his mother encouraged him to go, saying that it would be healthy for him to be away for a few days (Avendaño 2018). Once in Barcelona, when local artivists learned about his plight, they offered support to stage a protest outside the city’s Mexican Consulate. Lukas’s decision to use the Tehuana attire came naturally, as he had traveled with the wardrobe used in Réquiem. Moreover, he knew that dressing in in­ digenous clothing would attract the attention of media and, more im­ portantly, of the consulate employees, tasked with assisting Mexicans living in the city (Figure 10.2). During the performance itself, Lukas invited his local friends to take turns sitting next to him and holding hands, creating a tableau vivant reminiscent of Frida Kahlo’s emblematic double self-portrait Las dos Fridas (1939). When I asked Lukas if he had deliberately set out to recreate the famous painting, he responded that it wasn’t his intention. “I’m not dressed like Frida; the gowns used in the performance are of the kind worn by muxes during the traditional velas (ceremonious social gatherings in Tehuantepec)” (Avendaño 2018). During the performance he avoided wearing makeup, except for discrete black eyeliner, “because that is how women and muxes in Tehuantepec mourn.” To the critic’s eye, it’s perhaps inevitable to draw analogies not only to Frida’s work but also to its 1989 iteration by the Chilean performance artists Pedro Lemebel and Francisco Casas (known as las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, or Mares of the Apocalypse). Lemebel and Casas were openly gay artists during Augusto Pinochet’s repressive military

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Figure 10.2 Buscando a Bruno performed outside the Mexican Counsultate of Barcelona, Spain in June of 2018. Lukas Avendaño holds hands with a local artist from the Xica Teatre group. Photo still from the short documentary Buscando a Bruno, posted on YouTube. Used with per­ mission of Lukas Avendaño.

dictatorship, and the portrait of their Las dos Fridas pose––widely dis­ tributed during the early 1990s by LGBT activists throughout Latin America––suggested queer solidarity in the face of the death and pain caused by the AIDS epidemic (see Prieto Stambaugh, 2019, 1224–25). Lukas is familiar with Lemebel’s work and has quoted his poetic manifesto “Hablo por mi diferencia” (I speak for my difference, 1986) in his performance of Madame Gabia’ (2010). His work thus merges muxe aesthetics with a Latin American queer/cuir sensibility.5 The Barcelona performance achieved its desired effect: an employee from the consulate came out to ask if they could be of assistance. Lukas was prepared and said he had a letter to deliver to the Mexican consul regarding his brother’s disappearance. He was invited onto the building’s grounds, where he met with Vice-Consul Ernesto Herrera López, who promised to notify Mexican authorities. The next day, the Ministry of Foreign Relations in Mexico sent a cable to Oaxaca’s public prosecutor’s office (fiscalía), in­ structing the office to look into the case. However, the investigation was stalled for more than a year, during which Lukas’s family received an in­ sulting letter from Mexico City’s naval headquarters informing them that Bruno had been fired because of his failure to show up to work for three consecutive days. Not only was the navy doing nothing to help find an

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employee who had been reported forcefully disappeared months earlier, but with that letter they also were denying any kind of compensation to the family. It is a testimony to Lukas’s steadfastness and courage that, in spite of the blatant mistreatment received by government offices supposedly in charge of procuring justice, he continues to carry on with such grace. As he frequently points out, his is but one of thousands of stories shared by families in Mexico. Bruno’s disappearance occurred in the context of what is often referred to as a “spiral of violence” that began in 2006 when President Felipe Calderón declared war on drug trafficking. Since then, more than 70,000 people have been forcibly disappeared, according to a recent report by Mexico’s Secretariat of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación) (La Jornada 2020).6 This staggering number does not include the nearly 300,000 homici­ des––mostly feminicides––registered as of that year (El Universal 2020). This scenario of cruelty, death, and fear, found to a greater or lesser degree in many countries around the world, continues to thrive unabated, leading analysts to conclude it has become deeply ingrained in the modus operandi of governments and private corporations. Mexican theorist Sayak Valencia calls this “gore capitalism” (2010).

Gore capitalism in the Tehuantepec Isthmus Lukas’s struggle to demand justice regarding his brother Bruno––as in the case of the families of the forty-three students disappeared in the state of Guerrero in September 2014—lends a human dimension to the unfathom­ able numbers cited above. Most of the lives lost are of people who already suffered economic, sexual, or ethnic marginalization, people who were exploited and then disposed of by the “narco-machine.”7 Valencia has coined the term “gore capitalism” to speak of an extremely violent economy developed by organized crime in regions of impoverished populations, which profits from the predatory use of bodies and the sadistic display of violence (Valencia 2010, 7). To the question of what kind of in­ dividuals engage in this grim way of life, Valencia responds that they are “sujetos endriagos,” or monstrously inhuman subjects who espouse violent masculinity. Sujetos endriagos belong to the ranks of Third World subjects disempowered by global neoliberalism, held thrall by an economic coloni­ zation that ceaselessly promotes hyperconsumerism. Widespread margin­ alization and unemployment, suggests Valencia, has led working-class men to fear losing their virility, unable to perform their expected gender role as household provider. These young men are easy prey to the seductive lure of quick profit and macho-building risk involved in joining criminal organi­ zations (ibid., 9–11). In Mexico, as elsewhere, organized crime has infiltrated local government institutions, ranging from the police force to city halls. Banks and

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 181 transnational corporations dedicated to mining and infrastructure also partake of the lucrative black market of drugs, money laundering, or trading human bodies. As journalist Pedro Miguel has noted, the present scenario suggests that Mexico is becoming a “narco-state” or “narco-government,” where up to 5 percent of the Gross National Product derives solely from money laundering, apart from other dealings with organized crime (Miguel 2020). He points out that politicians and heads of private corporations often subcontract criminals to get rid of activists, journalists, and others perceived to pose a threat to their dealings. Lukas’s family doesn’t know the reason Bruno was targeted. Even though the navy employed him, his job description only involved office work in Mexico City. But there are reasons to believe he could have been a victim of the narco-machine in Oaxaca, a state that has geopolitical importance as part of the Trans-Isthmus Corridor, a long-planned alternative to the Panama Canal. A brief summary of this complex geographical and historical context is in order.8 Little more than 200 kilometers separate the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans at the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in its middle section. This narrow strip of land––one of the areas with the highest biodiversity in Mexico and the world––was for centuries a meeting point for many Mesoamerican peoples and civilizations, and during the colonial period was thought of as a possible passage to global maritime trade routes. In 1859, a recently independent Mexico signed the Treaty of Transit and Commerce with its northern neighbor, also known as the McLane-Ocampo Treaty, which, among other things, granted the United States exclusive and perpetual rights of transit over the isthmus for commercial and military purposes (cited in Torres 2017, 132). However, because of their Civil War, the United States never ratified the treaty, and it would take a few decades before the idea of building a railway across the isthmus came true. In 1894, under the government of Porfirio Díaz, the railway was finally inaugurated and began to function under several concessions to US passenger and cargo companies (Torres 2017, 131). This arrangement was terminated after the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. Ever since, this ecologically and culturally rich part of the country has been the scenario of at least six development and geostrategic projects, in­ cluding the Puebla-Panama Plan (Torres 2017). However, in none of these projects have the demands of the local inhabitants been seriously taken into account, and most economic development attempts have been accompanied by environmental pollution and social strife. The isthmus is a complex area. A meeting point of two major mountain range systems, it is divided into a northern and a southern portion, each of them with its own conflicting cultural, economic, and political needs. The northern portion, in the southern part of the state of Veracruz and into the state of Tabasco, is economically dominated by a giant oil industry, con­ centrated along the coastal strip and served by the port of Coatzacoalcos,

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with cattle ranching, subsistence agriculture, and plantations in its hinter­ land, plus other recently established industries. In the southern portion, in the eastern part of the state of Oaxaca and into the state of Chiapas, lies a more structured agricultural region with a tradition of community organi­ zation in the many indigenous groups that inhabit there, including the Zapotec.9 Local ways of living have been compromised by changes in the landed property regime, as well as by imposed industrialization and mod­ ernization schemes since the 1970s, which accelerated urban growth in the towns of Juchitán and Tehuantepec (Villagómez Velázquez, 2002, 85), close to where the Avendaño family is from. The already existing conflict brought about by unemployment and environmental pollution from the fishing in­ dustry and the refinery in the port of Salina Cruz (86) has been enhanced by the establishment of wind power plants in the mid-1990s, regarded by local communities as an act of territorial dispossession (see Nahmad et al. 2015). Mexico has a centuries-old tradition of indigenous territorial struggle, and the isthmus today is no exception. The current center-left administration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is intent on carrying out an overhaul of the existing infrastructure in the isthmus and attracting fresh investments in an attempt to restore the region on the global trade map. The current Trans-Isthmus Corridor project is conceived as a multimodal interoceanic transportation system featuring railways, roads, maritime ports, and airports. As opposed to its forerunners, this megaproject appears to be more mindful of the local population, as it intends to “propitiate the common good, well-being and prosperity” of the isthmus’s inhabitants (Candelas Ramírez 2019, 4, table 2), ensuring the participation of communities and fostering the development of an inclusive, sustainable economy respectful of both cultural and social values—including those of indigenous communities—and the environment (ibid., 5, table 3). This optimistic vision was announced by the newly inaugurated President López Obrador when he launched the project in December 2018 at the port of Salina Cruz, Oaxaca. Lukas took the opportunity to attend the rally and succeeded in catching the attention of López Obrador, who briefly paused to hear the story of Bruno’s disappearance, and asked him to convey details of the case to a naval officer, who would soon be appointed minister of the navy. In spite of having been promised a follow-up to the case, Lukas says no one ever called him back (Avendaño 2020a). Technical aspects aside––which question the very viability of this ambi­ tious project (Juárez 2019)––its social contradictions are already surfacing. Even before its promulgation, popular protests began across the isthmus (Oropeza 2019), and discontent has grown as concessions have been also granted to foreign companies (Castro Soto 2020, 13). To comply with in­ ternational human rights and labor standards, the federal administration claims to have conducted consultations with the local population. However, both local community leaders and outside observers have denounced these consultations as not only methodologically inadequate but also politically

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 183 illegitimate (Matías 2020; Manzo 2019; DesInformémonos 2020). The mur­ ders and disappearances of local activists are thought to be related to pro­ tests, outright opposition, and lawsuits (Comuneros 2020). According to the Al Jazeera news agency, the 2020 murder of fifteen in­ digenous activists in one of the coastal towns that belong to the TransIsthmus Corridor “bore all the hallmarks of drug cartel executions” (Wilson 2020). However, local authorities blamed this massacre on conflicts between rival political factions (Chaca 2020). The question remains, how can people fight for justice in such a struc­ turally violent scenario? Sociologist Rossana Reguillo has theorized that the effectiveness of the narco-machine’s power lies in its elusive ubiquity: “the narco [as organized crime is called in Mexico] de-localizes itself. Its power appeals precisely to the densest dimension of the machine’s logic: its pla­ celess ubiquity, which enables it to act in a silent but efficacious manner. Its presence is phantasmagoric. The narco-machine is a phantom” (Reguillo 2010, 8). One possible route to opposing this faceless power structure, Reguillo suggests, lies in grassroots networks of “counter-machines”: “By counter-machine (in the context of the work of the violence of narcotrafficking), I mean the group of fragile, intermittent, expressive, and frag­ mented devices society deploys to resist, make visible, or subtract power from the narco-machine” (ibid., 24). In a similar vein, Sayak Valencia maintains that resistance to gore ca­ pitalism is possible from a transfeminist praxis, which calls for linking cri­ tical thought and social action to enable a “processual micropolitics,” transcending toxic gender constructs to help reconstitute the social fabric (Valencia 2010). This is particularly relevant when taking into account Valencia’s argument that the narco-machine thrives on the production of violent masculinity. As she points out: “It’s not possible to forge an effective resistance to the current economic system, whose power is based on extreme violence, without questioning masculinity” (ibid.). According to Valencia, transfeminist subjects can help decenter the he­ gemonic notions of masculinity in order to forge community alliances. She envisions a “queer multitude” able to “develop g-local agency through performative materialization” (ibid.). While in her article Valencia doesn’t offer specific examples of this kind of activism, I find her words resonate closely with the work of artivists like Lukas Avendaño and also Lía García, a trans woman who has been working in male prisons in Mexico City, or­ ganizing workshops aimed at developing an affective sense of care through haptic touch (Delgado 2019). If this vision of transfeminist queer multitudes taking on the narcomachine sounds farfetched or utopian, theorist José Esteban Muñoz might have argued that this is precisely the point. Following the work of Robert Bloch, Muñoz maintains that utopian feelings are “indispensable to the act of imagining transformation,” making possible a “certain affective re­ animation” needed to displace “a disabling political pessimism” (Muñoz

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2019, 9). Queerness, contends Muñoz, “is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that something is missing” (ibid., 1). Facing this sense of loss, queer people may articulate a “critical idealism” through art (ibid., 2). Lukas’s political and artistic work gestures towards a muxe “butterfly utopia,” as is suggested by the title of the 2019 documentary of the same name that chronicles his struggle. I’ll return to this notion later. First, we’ll take a closer look at the ways Lukas has performed his brother’s dis­ appearance in Buscando a Bruno.

Performing the search for Bruno Avendaño In most presentations of Buscando a Bruno that took place during 2018 and 2019, Lukas was seen holding hands with diverse women, men, trans, and nonbinary people who accompanied him in silence.10 He held a large framed color picture of his brother close to his body. On the white surface sur­ rounding the picture, spectators could read the phrase “Continuamos bus­ cando a Bruno” (We continue searching for Bruno) above and “Por las y los desaparecidos en México” (For the disappeared in Mexico) on the bottom. In each performance, previously invited friends (and sometimes spontaneous onlookers) took turns sitting beside Lukas, dressed in Zapotec traditional feminine dress, the torso uncovered. They would first look forward toward the audience, then slowly turn to look into each other’s eyes in a serene but powerful engagement. During a presentation held on February 9, 2019, in front of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Chopo University Museum of con­ temporary art in Mexico City, I was able to see the hour-long performance from a very close distance (alternately standing and crouching three meters away from the performers). The rest of the audience was placed at a similar distance, forming an irregular semicircle. We were around sixty people, mostly students, fellow artists, activists, and teachers, including the critic Ileana Diéguez (curator for the performance) as well as Teresa Ralli and Miguel Rubio from the Peruvian Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani.11 To one side, among the audience members, stood the traditional Zapotec-Mixtec trumpeter Edgar Cartas Orozco playing a mournful elegy, which lasted for the entire performance. The performance slowly built its powerful effect on the audience as some fifteen people took turns sitting beside Lukas to hold his hand, gaze at the audience, and gently look at one another. Many of the fellow performers were unable to contain their tears while Lukas steadily held their empathic gaze, dressed in a black lace mourning dress, a translucent black shawl covering his head and shoulders. In spite of the presence of video and still cameras, as well as the discomfort caused by standing in the blazing sun, spectators remained attentive, silently bearing witness and also acting as collective companions. More than an act of political protest, this was an act

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 185 of steadfastness, of resisting violence with dignity, and of forming empathic bonds with those who suffer and demand justice. Around forty minutes into the performance, I noticed Lukas’s breathing became agitated, his eyes blazing with fierce emotion, defiantly looking forward. I could almost touch his feeling (to borrow Eve Sedgwick’s phrase), partaking of the artivist’s performative production of affect (Sedgwick 2003). There was a ritual cadence to this collective act of accompanying Lukas, the gesture of companionship iterated as each person held the performer’s hand. Their stillness was powerful, maintaining a sitting pose with a kinetic quality “full of promise, of immanence,” as Diana Taylor has argued in her discussion of Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s photo performances and tableaux vivants (Taylor 2012, 102). Lukas became familiar with this aesthetic when he collaborated with Gómez-Peña’s collective La Pocha Nostra during their Oaxaca workshops in the late 2000s. But rather than “performance art,” Lukas prefers to call this kind of work “installation for the human body” or a “nomadic installation for the ambulatory body” (Avendaño 2020c), sug­ gesting the body is a site where meaning and affect are installed. Japanese Kabuki actors developed a language of expressive poses in what they call the mie, a stylized gesture that “indicates an emotional climax.” To perform the mie, actors “need to impregnate themselves physically and emotionally with the required emotion, be it anger, fear, indignation or surprise” (Cavaye 2008, 77–78). Lukas, who is trained in contemporary dance and Butoh techniques, takes to his activist performances the art of condensing emotion in expressive gestures, installing silent rage in his body, projecting it to the public sphere. Still performances such as these––documented and dis­ seminated beyond their live presentation––reflect, according to Taylor, the “durational nature” of colonialist/racist/sexist practices that continue to dehumanize subaltern subjects (Taylor 2012, 101). On the other hand, the stillness of the performers asks audience members “to reflect and to interact” (ibid., 102) in a kind of work created “to provoke, and to animate us” (ibid., 103). Here Taylor anticipates a more recent theorization on the power of what she calls the “animative,” “a term that captures life’s fundamental movement… located in bodies rather than in language, its efficacy [lying] in the affective transmission from body to body…. [Animatives] may represent fears, hopes and also outrage” (Taylor 2017, 16). Buscando a Bruno is animative in the sense that it calls for witnesses to share rage while keeping empathic company. Lukas invites us to be patiently present there with him while he denounces the absence of his brother and at the same time makes evident the absence of justice and government response to his demands (Lozano de la Pola 2018, 38). Taylor maintains that the exclamation ¡Presente!, widespread in political demonstrations across Latin America, “can be understood as a war cry in the face of nullification; an act of solidarity as in responding, showing up, and standing with; a commitment to witnessing; a joyous accompaniment; present among, with, and to, walking and talking with others” (Taylor 2020, 4).

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Lukas’s installations of embodied gestures call for a particular kind of presence, not only as a political protest but also as an affirmation of queer/ cuir possibility. In Buscando a Bruno, Lukas takes to the phobic public sphere the presence of queer, trans, and nonbinary bodies accompanying one another in the struggle for justice. I maintain Lukas performs a “his­ torically dense queer gesture” (Muñoz 2019, 67), “dense with antinormative meaning” (ibid., note 223), taking cue from the writings of José Esteban Muñoz. This can be called, borrowing LaFountain-Stoke’s term, a transloca gesture,12 in its drawing from both local Zapotec muxe and international drag traditions, bringing to this call for finding the disappeared a queer/cuir demonstration of solidarity to resist violence. These gestures also points to what Muñoz calls a “queer futurity,” a utopian space of possibility where hope resists “the stultifying temporal logic of a broken down present” (ibid., 12). Cuban-Mexican critic Ileana Diéguez maintains that artivism in this context contributes to a communitas of pain (Diéguez 2016, 47–51); I would add that Lukas’s work also gestures toward a communitas of hope. I’ll re­ turn to the matter of queer utopia later, when discussing the documentary La utopía de la mariposa (The butterfly’s utopia, 2019). Lukas deploys a very different form of public intervention in Llamado a la autoridad (A call to the authorities), a series of actions that began during the fall of 2018 with massive numbers of phone calls to the offices of public prosecutors and attorneys known for their inaction in carrying out justice. When the phones were answered, activists would state the same phrase: “I’m Bruno Avendaño; I was disappeared on May 10 in Tehuantepec, Oaxaca.” In this way, the activists stubbornly brought the disappeared subject’s pre­ sence to the attention of authorities that would usually ignore him and others in the same plight. Llamado a la autoridad took a more radical form when Lukas carried out what he calls an “act of desperation” after continued meetings with prose­ cutors in Oaxaca and Mexico City failed to yield results. In early 2019, Lukas was invited to join a demonstration of madres de los desaparecidos in downtown Mexico City on May 10, the first anniversary of Bruno’s dis­ appearance. That day, he planned to join them at 11:00 a.m. but decided to first stage a protest outside the Fiscalía General de la República (FGR, or the National Prosecutor’s Office) on Insurgentes Avenue. To that end, he contacted a group of activists to help him with the symbolic occupation of the offices at 7:00 a.m., when employees would be arriving to work.13 This public version of Llamado a la autoridad began with Lukas and thirty people showing up in front of the modern, glass-covered FGR building. They were all dressed in white coveralls, similar to the uniforms used during forensic investigations in mass graves around Mexico.14 On the backs of the overalls was printed the phrase: “¿A dónde van los desaparecidos? Seguimos buscando a Bruno” (Where do the disappeared go? We keep on looking for Bruno). Lukas recounts how guards came out of the building to nervously survey the proceedings, calling employees to quickly go up to their offices,

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 187 perhaps concerned that the group was planning to set off explosives. The activists followed Lukas’s instructions, which he conveyed by what he calls “an encrypted hand language,” used “because I didn’t want onlookers to anticipate what we were up to” (Avendaño 2020b). Lukas then read out loud a poem to his brother, each verse repeated in chorus by the group (Figure 10.3):

May is the summer May is the day of the everlasting Sandunga May is when the earth’s craters exhale their breath… It was May, cicada child, winging of cicada, flamboyant child… It was May when they took you away, Bruno; But I know that when you finally emerge, you will be a beautiful Cicada orni, Because that is your tona, your nagual, your avatar. That is why May is not the month of the disappeared, It is instead the month of the immortalized, the everlasting. May 10, forty degrees Celsius in the shade,

Figure 10.3 Lukas Avendaño at the entrance to the Fiscalía General de la República (National Prosecutor’s Office) building in Mexico City, during the “Llamado a la autoridad” demonstration, May 2019. Photo still from the short video Niño cigarra (Cicada child), by Miguel Crespo, available on Vimeo. Used with permission of Lukas Avendaño.

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As had happened with the performance at the Mexican Consulate of Barcelona the year before, this action drew the attention of the authorities, and Lukas was asked to enter the building to state his demand. He was able to deliver a letter denouncing the fact that the previous prosecutor had “lost” papers pertaining to Bruno’s case, which resulted in further delays to the investigation. “After that demonstration of force,” Lukas told me, “I was able to meet with the national prosecutor, who ordered the creation of dialogue meetings [mesas de trabajo] to look into the case. As of that day, things are finally advancing, albeit at a snail’s pace, but I’m accusing pre­ vious officials of deliberately delaying the investigation and thus acquiescing to Bruno’s disappearance” (Avendaño 2020b). Lukas also points out how justice in Mexico is made inaccessible to the poor, via the high costs involved in everything from taking buses to the cities where you need to file demands to the prohibitive fees involved in hiring lawyers.16 “Bear in mind,” Lukas told me, “that farmworkers in rural Oaxaca barely earn two hundred pesos [less than ten US dollars] a day!” Add to that the lack of knowledge of citizens’ rights and legal terminology, the Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth awaiting those who attempt to file demands, plus the constant fear of suffering harm from criminals who would block any investigation into their dealings. It is for this reason that families of the disappeared have formed hundreds of independent groups; they are working-class people (mostly housewives) who, regrettably, need to become experts in forensic excavations. These people, at times aided by nonprofit organizations, use the kind of protective uniform donned by the activists of Llamado a la autoridad. A month after the demonstration in front of the FGR, Buscando a Bruno was programmed as the opening act for the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ XI Encuentro (part conference, part performance festival) at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). On June 9, 2019, the performance was staged in front of the UNAM’s University Museum of Contemporary Art. Lukas showed up wearing a black Tehuana skirt, his body and head completely covered with a skin-colored bodysuit, which impeded the audience from contemplating his naked torso and striking gaze, as in previous versions of the performance. The image thwarted audience expectations of seeing “the muxe artist” while suggesting the ambivalence of bodily presence/absence. Lukas told me one of the reasons he decided to wear that bodysuit was to avoid the voyeuristic gaze of the Encuentro’s international audience. He also wished to emulate “the feeling of loneliness and confinement” that people who are kidnapped by criminal organizations experience. “Kidnapped people are always blindfolded, and if murdered, their bodies are found in garbage bags or wrapped with blankets, so in the performance, I wanted to approach that

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 189

Figure 10.4 Performance of ¿Dónde está Bruno? during the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ XI Encuentro at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), June 2019. Photo: Manuel Molina Martagon, by permission of the Hemispheric Institute.

experience of sensory deprivation and absolute loneliness, which was very difficult, as I always want to be close to my audience and to engage people directly” (Avendaño 2020b) (Figure 10.4). Some spectators grew restless, the midday summer sun bearing down on them, their attention wandering as they greeted fellow Encuentro partici­ pants. As opposed to previous versions of Buscando a Bruno, where people could gather close to the performers, here they were separated from the performance area by a large reflecting pool.17 At one point, spectators were given white sheets of paper and invited to fold paper boats and make them float on the pool. About this action, Lukas told me: “The act of folding paper boats transports us to our childhood but is also a metaphor of dis­ appearance, of the invisibility of criminal actions. One can see how the little boats begin to sink and disappear from the surface, but no one in the au­ dience does a thing about it, so I make them accomplices to the sinking of those fragile paper bodies” (Avendaño 2020b). At the end of the performance, an unannounced group of about twenty people arrived and walked into the pool, where the remaining paper boats struggled to stay afloat. They were the activists who had participated in the

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Llamado a la autoridad protest outside the FGR the previous month. This time, in addition to their white overalls, they wore sanitary face masks si­ milar to the ones that became compulsory during the following year’s COVID-19 pandemic. The group approached Lukas and surrounded him completely as we in the audience read the name B-R-U-N-O, one letter written on the back of each one of five uniformed activists. The group eventually broke up and abandoned the space, but Lukas was nowhere to be seen. Had he been dressed in one of the uniforms to conceal his departure? Edgar Cartas’s trumpet continued to play its last, mournful notes, as we realized the act of disappearance was complete18 (Figure 10.5).

The politics of visibility During our conversations, Lukas remarked that his performances are not mainly concerned with bringing about visibility but rather with the attain­ ment of justice: “I don’t want to limit my work to mere visibility, which is often achieved without advancing in the procurement of justice. What I

Figure 10.5 Concluding moments of ¿Dónde está Bruno? during the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ XI Encuentro at Mexico City’s National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), June 2019. Photo: Archive of the Hemispheric Institute.

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 191 want is to stop this kind of thing from repeating, so that others don’t have to suffer what we are going through” (Avendaño 2020b). As I have discussed above, Lukas, along with his family and activist friends, has engaged in numerous tactics in his search for Bruno, including filing legal paper work, putting out social media alerts, participating in panel discussions, becoming the subject of a prize-winning documentary, and staging political demonstrations and performance art. While public and media attention are important ways of speaking truth to power, Lukas has practiced caution in how much he makes visible to whom, as mentioned in the version of Buscando a Bruno performed during the Hemispheric Institute’s XI Encuentro. In Llamado a la autoridad, he forgoes signifiers of muxeidad and instead appears nearly incognito, dressed in the identical head-covering uniform worn by the other activists. These interventions contrast with other performances in Lukas’s re­ pertoire, notably Madame Gabia’ (2010) and No soy persona, soy mariposa (2014), where he engages in defiantly erotic choreographies, wearing either a sequined red skirt or stiletto high-heeled boots, wielding two horsewhips (Prieto Stambaugh 2017, 45–48). These performances can be placed in the tradition of postporn, or pornoterrorista, acts, in-your-face interventions that unsettle the dominant heteronormativity, reclaiming the performer’s right to the dissident mixing of politics, sexuality, and pleasure (see Torres 2013). However, as Lukas pointed out in remarks quoted above, Buscando a Bruno is an altogether different matter, involving a very personal and painful struggle for justice. Peggy Phelan has expressed skepticism regarding the politics of visibility, cautioning against assuming that increased visibility automatically leads to enhanced political power, as it can backfire, making minoritarian subjects easy prey to surveillance and fetishism (Phelan 1993, 6–7). Using examples such as the Guerrilla Girls’ anonymous interventions, Phelan advocates another route: that of working with the unmarked, in performances that defer the voyeuristic gaze, resist the economy of reproduction, and articulate an “active vanishing” (ibid., 19). The unmarked, maintains Phelan, is pos­ sible in works of performance art where it “shows itself through the negative and through disappearance” (ibid., 27). But what kind of disappearance are we talking about? In his discussion on performances that address the ambivalence of presence and disappearance, the Spanish critic José A. Sánchez writes of three kinds of “exclusions from the sphere of appearance”: (a) passive disappearance, which he describes as “a state of invisibility characteristic of the dispossessed, of the marginal, of those who are not given any social value”; (b) forced disappearance, “the most radical form of exclusion”; and (c) active disappearance, which can be “a means of emphasizing the absence of those who are not allowed to appear or those who were forcibly disappeared” (Sánchez 2019, 6). Regarding his brother’s plight, Lukas has stated that physical dis­ appearance “is the culmination of a series of previous disappearances.

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Bruno used to be a jornalero [itinerant farmworker], also an ‘illegal’ im­ migrant to the United States. People like him are always already desapar­ ecidos in the social, economic, cultural, and workforce spheres” (Avendaño in RompevientoTV 2019). Bruno went from a “passive” to a “forced dis­ appearance,” in Sánchez’s terms, to which Lukas responds with public performances of “active disappearance.” Lukas’s work employs tactical negotiations of visibility and invisibility. While it’s at some point important to deflect the voyeuristic gaze of curious onlookers, he finds power in “darle rostro a los desaparecidos,” that is, making public the faces and names of people who have suffered forced disappearance. “It is important to allow the desaparecidos to have enun­ ciation,” Lukas points out. “The face of Bruno does not belong to an in­ dividual, but to thousands of men and women” (Avendaño in RompevientoTV, 2019). As of this writing, the most recent public staging of Llamado a la auto­ ridad occurred in Lukas’s hometown of Tehuantepec on May 10, 2020, the second anniversary of Bruno’s disappearance. At that time Mexico (as were most countries in the world) was undergoing nationwide confinement and social distancing measures to hinder the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. For this scaled-down version of Llamado a la autoridad, Lukas was ac­ companied by two other activists to the regional prosecutor’s office and later to the local headquarters of the human rights defender. Wearing white overalls and surgical face masks, with photos of Bruno dressed in his naval officer’s uniform hanging from their necks, the group proceeded to paste posters and paint graffiti concerning his disappearance on the buildings’ facades. In the short video posted by Lukas on Facebook to document this action, we can hear his voice-over saying: Confinement from COVID-19 adds to the perpetuation of the crime-onall-fronts scenario to which the Mexican State has subjected us. We refuse to become victims; we refuse to be incriminated by our phenotype. I don’t accept the stigmatizing categories of “stubborn” and “social misfits” they try to impose on us. In defiance of such categorizing, we rise above this catastrophe of sanitary, humanitarian, ethical, and aesthetic proportions to tell them we will not leave. Though they would have us disappear, there will always be someone else to fill that void with the only resource we, as the less than nobodies, have: the conscientious objection to any inhuman order.19 Lukas denounces how state agencies dismiss crimes against citizens they should be protecting. He emphatically repudiates the mechanisms of racial

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 193 and class stigmatization used to marginalize and disappear those who dare call for justice. The brief but impactful statement makes clear that the power of those branded “less than nobody” lies in collective action and the “conscientious objection to any inhuman order.” Even in the midst of the pandemic, Lukas says, “¡Presente!” (Taylor 2020), making his body politi­ cally present before the closed, indifferent government buildings, affirming a collective determination to continue demanding accountability. Lukas’s work engages in what Diéguez describes as the task of “imagining a way of writing unfound bodies” (Diéguez 2016, 272) and of creating rites to “sustain the yearning for lost affects” (ibid., 265). This is one of the most critical challenges facing those who wish to create artistic evocations of absent bodies. It is eloquently summarized by the Peruvian artist Emilio Santisteban in his question: “What role does body art play in a country of disappeared bodies?” (quoted in Diéguez 2016, 342). The paradoxical tasks of representing the unrepresentable and embodying disappearance are addressed in Diéguez’s important book Cuerpos sin duelo (Bodies without mourning). The author discusses several possible ways, exemplified by the work of artists and activists in Mexico, Colombia, and other Latin American countries. These are artists who work with procedures of evocation instead of substitution or who engage in allegories of mourning to suggest that which has been robbed of its image (Diéguez 2016, 297–322). Following Georges Didi-Huberman, Diéguez calls for working with the image’s phantasmal quality, exploring the latent life that inhabits, for ex­ ample, the picture of a lost relative (ibid., 220). These are all ways of re­ sisting the ghastly “necrotheatre” staged by criminals in public spaces (ibid., 125–242). To oppose these “punitive” displays of extreme violence, Diéguez points to art that articulates “performativities of pain, that are at the same time performativities of a desire to perpetuate and affirm life” (ibid., 81). Buscando a Bruno stands out as a performance that fully embraces the challenge of bringing forced disappearance into the public space of ap­ pearance, as Riansares Lozano has argued following Hannah Arendt’s formulation (Lozano de la Pola 2018, 32–33). Spaces of appearance are, according to Arendt, made possible through collective political action “wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action” (quoted in d’Entreves 2019). Lukas’s work brings together people of all genders as a liminal “moral community” (Diéguez 2016, 49) that demands accountability and transforms pain into political action. The stakes are high, as the violence of the narco-machine often appears insurmountable, leading Diéguez to interrogate the extent to which artists are able to materialize “liminal microutopias” in such a scenario (ibid., 47). In the following concluding section I suggest Lukas has found ways to interpellate the state and the law with the graceful power of muxeidad, gesturing toward his particular micro-utopia symbolized by a colorful migrating insect.

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The butterfly’s utopia During the early months of 2019, independent filmmaker Miguel J. Crespo followed Lukas in order to tell his story in the documentary La utopía de la mariposa. At the outset of the striking thirty-minute film, we can see Lukas working with his mother tending goats in their farm in Tehuantepec. Felipa Martínez Avendaño is not the prototypical Tehuana matriarch pictured in Graciela Iturbide’s iconic photographs of Zapotec women in Juchitán. She has a masculine demeanor, wearing an old baseball cap, checkered shirt, and baggy pants as she works in the field or speaks candidly about how she loves Lukas but is actually not too fond of seeing him perform.20 In other scenes, Lukas is shown applying makeup and fixing his hair as he talks about playing with gender roles as a child, something that is “culturally permitted” in his community. After some brief scenes of Lukas’s early work as a per­ formance artist, the film arrives at the topic of Bruno’s disappearance and the ensuing struggle. In the last sequence, following the painful chronicle of outrage and gov­ ernment indifference, we see a nearly naked Lukas refreshing himself in a river. The images, suggesting cleansing and renewal, are accompanied by Lukas’s serene voice-over: “Searching for Bruno is… well, it’s a utopia, because in this context of 40,000 desaparecidos, it’s a utopia to think you can have a different outcome to that of the 40,000. To think we can find him, alive and well… that’s a utopia, because the other 40,000 disprove that possibility.”21 The documentary’s title links this utopia to the image of a butterfly, a creature that was featured in Lukas’s 2014 performance No soy persona, soy mariposa (I’m not a person, I’m a butterfly). In that piece, Lukas embodied the strong erotic presence of an indigenous high-heeled dominatrix, emer­ ging from an oversize paper Monarch butterfly hanging in the back­ ground.22 As he performed a slow choreography looking straight into the eyes of the student and teacher audience huddled close to the catwalk, Lukas spoke in a powerful poetic voice. His speech borrowed from fellow per­ former Felipe Osornio’s manifesto “Pensamiento Puñal” (roughly translated as “Faggot Thought”): I’m going to speak, I’m going to speak, I’m going to speak for those who are afraid to go to their neighbor­ hoods and schools… I’m going to speak for those who will make of their lives a masterpiece, To jump over the precipice, and fly, I’m going to speak for all the occupied bodies, From the operation room, amniotic liquid, mother’s blood, Up to the shooting wall, the mad house, the hospital, the concentration camps with pink triangles…23

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 195 This is a butterfly warrior for the dispossessed queer multitudes who are stigmatized because of their social class and skin color. In speaking for “all occupied bodies,” he deploys a decolonial gesture, as theorized by Walter Mignolo, a set of performative actions, sentiments, movements, and speech acts that “directly or indirectly disobey the dictates of the colonial matrix” (Mignolo 2014, 13). Mignolo maintains the decolonial gesture “is a strategy of delinking from Western modern epistemology and its hermeneutic which is based in the detachment of soul/body, mind/body and in a Masculine superior being, and also a strategy of regaining the confidence and the knowing of the androgynous Energetic force of Creation” (ibid., 8). Here the author refers to the cosmology of Native Americans and Canadian First Nations peoples, known in Latin America as “pueblos originarios.” Lukas’s muxeidad is informed by these systems of knowledge, which in­ clude the notion of the “two-spirited people,” those who espouse both the feminine and the masculine. According to Canadian author Gilbert Deschamps, First Nations have a long history of recognizing two-spirited individuals within the community and often consider them to be visionaries and healers (Deschamps 1998, 1). Two-spirited people and muxes have the ability to perform decolonial gestures that disobey the ideology of the “Masculine superior being,” contributing to deflect the hyperviolent mas­ culinity that propels gore capitalism. Lukas has spoken about the need to exercise an “archaeology of memory” to recall the way muxes were historically stigmatized during the colonial period by Spanish priests, who branded them as nefarious sodomites (Avendaño 2020a). At the same time, priests considered some Zapotec de­ ities, such as the bat god to be representations of the devil. Lukas explains bats are called biguidi beela and biguidi zinia in the Zapotec language or, in his own words, “mariposas de carne” (flesh and skin butterflies). “Maybe that’s why homosexuals are called mariposones!” he says. The regular but­ terfly, on the other hand, is called biguidi, “el que tiene piel de aire” (the one with skin made of air). He suggests the biguidi beela bat is the muxe’s to­ temic spirit and links it with the image of the mariposa, or gay butterfly (Avendaño 2020a).24 Lukas’s decolonial archaeology transforms historical homophobia into a cosmology populated by airborne creatures that are able to gracefully resist oppression. The Chicana poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa found the Mesoamerican bat god to be a powerful metaphor for the kind of vision discerned in the work of Chicanx and border artists who exist, she argues, in the space of nepantla, a Nahuatl word that suggests a liminal and transitional state of “in-between” (Anzaldúa 1993, 180). In her key essay “Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera,” Anzaldúa associates the murciélago god with the “nepantla stage of border artists––the dark cave of creativity where they hang upside down, turning the self upside down in order to see from another point of view, one that brings a new understanding” (ibid., 183–84). Maybe Lukas Avendaño’s biguidi beela also has this epistemic power of

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perceiving the narco-machine from another point of view and of finding ways to demolish its foundational reliance on gender violence. Butterflies are remarkable beings, both fragile and resilient, as seen with the migrating monarchs that annually cross an entire continent seeking new homes. Lukas’s performances gesture toward a butterfly utopia where queer/ cuir multitudes enact “a refusal of… finitude” (Muñoz 2019, 65) and forge alliances with international activists from all walks of life. As Mignolo points out, “Decolonial gestures in one domain impinge on the others. It is the butterfly effect” (Mignolo 2014, 18). Buscando a Bruno and Llamado a la autoridad are already working to interpellate the state and the law in actions that, along with many others across Mexico and Latin America, offer a glimmer of hope for justice.

Epilogue On December 3, 2020, news broke that justice authorities had found Bruno’s body in a “clandestine” common grave close to the town of Salina Cruz in the Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca (Manzo 2020). The report states that the Avendaño family received Bruno’s remains at his mother’s home for proper burial, a painful event that nonetheless was “good news” after 30 months of searching. A few days later, Lukas posted a video on Facebook where he thanks all involved in making the return possible but affirms that his acti­ vism will continue, centered on bringing justice to the forced disappearance and murder of his brother. He also denounces local officials who deceived his family by falsely claiming they had seen Bruno at a party a few days after his disappearance. Lukas later told me his family had been notified of the discovery on November 12, and that the investigation had been conducted under the supervision of the Oaxaca Public Prosecutor’s Special Unit for Forced Disappearance (2020d). However, for some reason, officials withheld the information for four months, as the document they were given shows the results of the test on Bruno’s remains had been ready as early as July 2020. I asked Lukas what comes next, to which he replied that he and his family will keep demanding truth, justice, accountability, reparations, and the assur­ ance that crimes of this kind will not go unpunished. Bruno Avendaño can finally be mourned, but Lukas will continue to work with activists and families to denounce crimes against humanity in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas.

Notes 1 Artivist refers to people whose work mixes art and political activism. 2 I’ll use the artist’s given name to avoid confusing him with his brother Bruno. 3 Lukas holds a BA in anthropology from the Universidad Veracruzana, where he also studied contemporary dance. 4 See Eide (2016) for a summary of the way this concept famously coined by Gayatri Spivak has been discussed in the humanities.

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 197 5 Cuir is a recently coined term that twists the English adjective queer as a deco­ lonial gesture that in the geopolitical south aims to foreground LGBTQ+ lives and struggles (Valencia 2015, 32–33). 6 Up to 2019, official estimates mentioned around 40,000 disappeared, so it was surprising that the number almost doubled after the current administration’s report. 7 Narco-machine is a term coined by the Mexican sociologist Rossana Reguillo (2010). 8 I thank my partner Luis Esparza for helping me with the Trans-Isthmus Corridor’s human geography and history. 9 Other ethnic groups that inhabit the isthmus region are the Huave (or Ikoots), Zoque, Chontal, and Mixe. The Zapotec call themselves Binnizá, meaning “people who come from the clouds” (Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas 2017). 10 Buscando a Bruno was performed eight times between June 2018 and August 2019 in public spaces in Barcelona; Oaxaca City; Mexico City; Valladolid, Spain; and St. Gallen, Switzerland. 11 The performance was part of a series of lectures and round-table discussions on art and politics in Latin America held at the museum. Right after the Buscando a Bruno performance, Lukas, Yuyachkani director Miguel Rubio, and activist Mario Vergara participated in a discussion with the audience, facilitated by critic Ileana Diéguez. 12 La Fountain‐Stokes proposes the term transloca as a vernacular queer of color “critical intervention to account for the intersection of space, geography, and sexuality” in the work of drag (and loca) performance artists who live in trans­ local or diasporic contexts (2011). 13 I asked Lukas about the people who help him with these actions, and he said they are a group dedicated to making injustice visible in Mexico, choosing to remain anonymous. 14 Llamado a la autoridad can be seen online in a short video produced as an ad­ dendum to the documentary La utopía de la mariposa: https://vimeo.com/33 7897667. 15 Mayo es el verano Mayo es el día de la inmortal Sandunga Es mayo cuando los cráteres de la tierra exhalan su aliento (…) Es mayo, niño chicharra, aleteo de chicharra, niño flamboyán (…) Es mayo cuando te llevaron, Bruno; Pero yo sé que cuando emerjas, serás una hermosa Cicada orni, Porque ese es tu tona, tu nahual, tu avatar. Por eso mayo no es el mes de los desaparecidos, Sino de los inmortalizados y perpetuados. Diez de mayo, cuarenta grados centígrados a la sombra, Diez de mayo es el día que te llevaron, Bruno. ¡Seguimos buscando a Bruno! 16 Lukas estimates that, up to mid-2020, he and his family have spent nearly 500,000 pesos (around $23,000 US) in legal and other expenses, funds that were raised through enormous effort (Avendaño 2020c). 17 Lukas told me he had originally intended to sit in the middle of the pool, having the audience around him, but the museum didn’t allow it (Avendaño 2020b). 18 For another account of this performance, see Medina 2019. 19 “El confinamiento del COVID-19 suma a que se perpetúe el delito pluriofensivo al que nos ha sometido el Estado Mexicano. Nos negamos a ser víctimas, nos negamos a ser incriminados por nuestro fenotipo. No acepto sus categorías que nos estigmatizan llamándonos necios, inadaptados. Pese a todas sus enun­ ciaciones, nos sobreponemos a esta catástrofe sanitaria, humanitaria, ética y estética, para decirles que no nos iremos. Aunque desaparecidos nos quieran,

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siempre habrá alguien que llenará este vacío con el único recurso que tenemos los menos que menos que nadie: la objeción de conciencia a toda orden inhumana.” In the documentary, Lukas says he’s the third of six siblings, Bruno being the youngest. Their father, whom Doña Felipa mentions enjoyed attending Lukas’s performances, passed away in 2011. “Buscar a Bruno es como, es una utopía. Porque en este contexto de cuarenta mil desaparecidos, pues es una utopía pensar que puedes tener un final diferente a esos cuarenta mil. Pensar que lo podemos llegar a encontrar, y lo podemos en­ contrar con vida y bien, eso es una utopía, porque te desmienten esas otras cuarenta mil ausencias.” Here I describe the performance done for students and professors of the Universidad Veracruzana’s performing arts programs in the city of Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico (September 2014). “Voy a hablar, voy a hablar, voy a hablar por los que tienen miedo de llegar a los barrios y a las escuelas, […] Voy a hablar por los que quieren hacer de su vida una obra maestra, saltar al vacío, volar, voy a hablar por todos los cuerpos ocupados, desde la sala de operaciones, líquido amniótico, sangre de madre, hasta el paredón, el manicomio, el hospital, los campos de concentración con triángulos rosas…” The word mariposa is used in homosexual slurs such as mariposón, alluding to the term maricón (sissy). Mexican gay director and actor Tito Vasconcelos playfully employed this terminology in his 1985 show Mariposas y maricosas (see Prieto Stambaugh 2000).

Bibliography Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1993. “Border Arte: Nepantla, el lugar de la frontera.” In La frontera/The Border: Art about the Mexico/United States Border Experience. San Diego: Centro Cultural de la Raza, Museum of Contemporary Art, 176–186. Exhibition catalog. Avendaño, Lukas. 2018. Skype interview by Antonio Prieto Stambaugh, October 29, 2018. Avendaño, Lukas. 2019. “Carta de un indio remiso.” Concilium: Revista Internacional de Teología 383 (November 2019): 45–50. Avendaño, Lukas. 2020a. Digital roundtable discussion with Lukas Avendaño, hosted by Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Puebla, June 6, 2020. Avendaño, Lukas. 2020b. Skype interview by Antonio Prieto Stambaugh, June 8. Avendaño, Lukas 2020c. Skype interview by Antonio Prieto Stambaugh, June 15. Avendaño, Lukas 2020d. Email communication with Antonio Prieto Stambaugh, December 9. Candelas Ramírez, Roberto. 2019. El proyecto del tren transístmico. Cámara de Diputados, LXIV Legislatura, Carpeta Informativa no. 119, July 2019. Mexico City: Centro de Estudios Sociales y de Opinión Pública. http://www5.diputados.gob.mx/ index.php/camara/Centros-de-Estudio/CESOP/Estudios-e-Investigaciones/CarpetasInformativas/Carpeta-informativa-No.-119.-El-proyecto-del-tren-transistmico. Castro Soto, Gustavo. 2020. “El Corredor Interocéanico. Por decreto, el mayor despojo del terriorio mexicano…” El escaramujo, 103. San Cristóbal de las Casas: Otros Mundos. https://ia801908.us.archive.org/7/items/el-escaramujo-103-corredorinteroceanico/EL%20ESCARAMUJO%20103%20-%20CORREDOR%20INTERO­ CEANICO.pdf.

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 199 Cavaye, Ronald. 2008. Kabuki: Teatro tradicional japonés. Gijon, Spain: Satori Ediciones. Chaca, Roselia. 2020. “Confirman massacre de 15 ikoots en San Mateo del Mar por conflicto político-electoral.” El Universal, “Municipios,” June 22, 2020. https:// oaxaca.eluniversal.com.mx/municipios/22-06-2020/confirman-masacre-de-15-ikootsen-san-mateo-del-mar-por-conflicto-politico. Comuneros de San Mateo del Mar. 2019. “Misión Civil de Observación en el Istmo: amplificando y entrelazando voces.” Sipaz, 24 no. 4 (December 2019). https:// www.sipaz.org/articulo-mision-civil-de-observacion-en-el-istmo-amplificando-yentrelazando-voces/. Crespo, Miguel J. dir. 2019. Utopía de la mariposa. Documentary produced by Manuel de León, Plumas Atómicas. Delgado, Cinthia. 2019. “Haptic Tactic: Hypertenderness for the [Mexican] State and the Performances of Lia García.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 6, no. 2 (May): 164–179. d’Entreves, Maurizio. 2019. “Hannah Arendt.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Archive, Fall 2019 ed., edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/arendt/. Deschamps, Gilbert. 1998. We Are Part of a Tradition: A Guide on Two-Spirited People for First Nations Communities. Mino-B’maadiziwin Project. Toronto: 2Spirited People of the First Nations. www.2spirits.com. 2020 DesInformémonos. 2020. “Consultas para aprobar Corredor Transístmico han sido ‘amañadas.’” January 16, 2020. https://desinformemonos.org/consultaspara-aprobar-corredor-transistmico-han-sido-amanadas-ucizoni/. Diéguez, Ileana. 2016.Cuerpos sin duelo. Iconografías y teatralidades del dolor. Monterrey, Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León. Eide, Elisabeth. 2016. “Strategic Essentialism.” The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Nancy A. Naples. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118663219.wbegss554 Instituto Nacional de los Pueblos Indígenas. 2017. “Etnografía del pueblo zapoteco del Istmo de Tehuantepec (Binnizá).” Gobierno de México. https://www.gob.mx/ inpi/articulos/etnografia-del-pueblo-zapoteco-del-istmo-de-tehuantepec-binniza. La Fountain‐Stokes, Lawrence. 2011. “Translocas: Migration, Homosexuality, and Trans‐vestism in Recent Puerto Rican Performance.” E‐misférica, 8, no. 1 (June 5, 2019). https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica‐81/8‐1‐essays/translocas.html. 2020 La Jornada. 2020. “Gobernación: Aún desaparecidas, 73 mil 201 personas.” July 14, 2020, front page. Juárez, Pilar. 2019. “Plan de corredor Transístmico, ‘una quimera’, alertan expertos.” Milenio Diario. https://www.milenio.com/negocios/plan-corredor-transistmicoquimera-alertan-expertos. Lozano de la Pola, Riansares. 2018. “¿Dónde está Bruno Avendaño? La práctica artística como ‘espacio de aparición.’” El Ornitorrinco Tachado. Revista de artes visuales 8 (October 2018): 29–39. https://ornitorrincotachado.uaemex.mx/article/ view/11050. Manzo, Diana. 2019. “Rechazan ONG consultas sobre corredor transístmico y megaproyecto eólico.” La Jornada, July 15, 2016, p. 26. https://www.jornada. com.mx/2019/07/15/estados/026n2est.

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Manzo, Diana. 2020. “Después de 30 meses, encuentran sin vida a Bruno Avendaño, marino desaparecido en Oaxaca.” Aristegui Noticias, December 3, 2020. https:// aristeguinoticias.com/0312/mexico/despues-de-30-meses-encuentran-sin-vida-abruno-avendano-marino-desaparecido-en-oaxaca. Matías, Pedro. “Indígenas presentan queja ante la CNDH por ‘consultas’ amañadas para corredor transístmico.” Proceso. Wednesday, January 29, 2020. https:// www.proceso.com.mx/nacional/2020/1/29/indigenas-presentan-queja-ante-la-cndhpor-consultas-amanadas-para-corredor-transistmico-237844.html. Medina, Alejo. 2019. “¿Dónde está Bruno?/Where is Bruno?” Performance Research 24, no. 7 (October 2019): 56–60. Mignolo, Walter. 2014. “Looking for the Meaning of ‘Decolonial Gesture.’” E-misférica, vol. 11, issue 1. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/es/emisferica-11-1decolonial-gesture/11-1-essays/looking-for-the-meaning-of-decolonial-gesture.html. Miguel, Pedro. 2020. “Narcoestado.” La Jornada, August 14, 2020. www.jornada. com.mx/2020/08/14/opinion/019a1pol. Muñoz, J. Esteban. 2019. Cruising Utopia: The There and Then of Queer Futurity. 10th anniversary ed. New York: New York University Press. Nahmad, Salomón, Abraham Nahón and Rubén Langlé. 2015. La visión de los ac­ tores sociales frente a los proyectos eólicos del Istmo de Tehuantepec. Mexico: Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social. Oropeza, Daliri. 2019. “Comunidades indígenas hacen bloque contra proyecto transístmico.” Pie de Página, Section “Territorios,” September 11, 2019. https:// piedepagina.mx/comunidades-indigenas-hacen-bloque-contra-proyecto-transistmico/. Phelan, Peggy. 1993. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London, New York: Routledge. Prieto Stambaugh, Antonio. 2000. “Camp, Carpa, and Cross-Dressing in the Theater of Tito Vasconcelos.” In Corpus Delecti: Performance Art in the Americas, edited by Coco Fusco. London & New York: Routledge, 83–96. Prieto Stambaugh, Antonio. 2014. “‘RepresentaXión’ de un muxe: la identidad performática de Lukas Avendaño.” Latin American Theatre Review, vol. 1, no. 48, (Fall 2014): 31–53. Prieto Stambaugh, Antonio. 2017. “¿Traducir performance? La representación subvertida.” In Dilemas de la representación: presencias, performance, poder, edited by Adriana Guzmán, Rodrigo Díaz Cruz, and Anne W. Johnson. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, INAH, Juan Pablos. Prieto Stambaugh, Antonio. 2019. “Performance Art in Latin America.” In The Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History, vol. 3, edited by Howard Chiang. Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1223–1228. Reguillo, Rossana. 2010. “La narcomáquina y el trabajo de la violencia: apuntes para su decodificación.” E-misférica, vol. 8, issue 2, 2010. https://hemi.nyu.edu/ hemi/es/e-misferica-82/reguillo. Sánchez, José A. “Presence and Disappearance.” Performance Research, 24, no. 7 (2019): 6–15. Sedgwick, E. Kosofsky. 2003. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

The queer/muxe performance of disappearance 201 Taylor, Diana. 1994. “Performing Gender: Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.” In Negotiating Performance, edited by Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 275–305. Taylor, Diana. 2012. “Still Performance.” In Gómez-Peña, Guillermo: Homo fron­ terizus [1492–2020], edited by Orlando Brito and Oma-Pascual Castillo. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, 97–103. Taylor, Diana. 2017. “¡Presente! La política de la presencia.” Investigación Teatral, vol. 8, no. 12 (August–December 2017): 11–34. https://investigacionteatral.uv.mx/ index.php/investigacionteatral/article/view/2550. Taylor, Diana. 2020. ¡Presente! The Politics of Presence. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Torres, Diana J. 2013. Pornoterrorismo. Mexico City: Editorial Txalaparta y Surplus. Torres, Jaime. 2017. “El corredor del Istmo de Tehuantepec: de los proyectos fallidos a las nuevas posibilidades para su desarrollo.” Espacios Públicos, vol. 20, no. 48. https://www.redalyc.org/pdf/676/67652755007.pdf. 2020 El Universal. 2020. “La radiografía de la violencia en México… 2019, el año más violento,” January 21, 2020. https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/estados/ radiografia-de-la-violencia-en-mexico-record-de-asesinatos-en-2019. Valencia, Sayak. 2015. “Del queer al cuir: Ostranénie, geopolítica y epistemia desde el sur glocal.” In Queer & cuir: políticas de lo irreal, compiled by Fernando R. Lanuza and Raúl M. Carrasco. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, 39–43. Valencia, Sayak. 2010. “Capitalismo gore: narcomáquina y performance de género.” E-misférica, vol. 8, issue 2. https://hemisphericinstitute.org/es/emisferica-82/ triana.html. Villagómez Velázquez, Yanga. 2002. “Gestión social del agua y cambio agrario en el Istmo de Tehuantepec.” Estudios Agrarios, 8, no. 20 (May-August 2002), 1–41. http://www.pa.gob.mx/publica/cd_estudios/Paginas/autores/villagomez%20velaz­ quez%20yanga%20gestion%20social%20del%20agua.pdf. Wilson, Eoin. 2020. “Murders, Megaprojects, and a ‘New Panama Canal’ in Mexico.” Al Jazeera English, July 13, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/ features/murders-megaprojects-panama-canal-mexico-200712063126326.html.

11 “Why are the Canadian authorities afraid of this play?” Eight Men Speak and Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada Alan Filewod Theater activists in Canada have long understood that their work is just one element in the complex processes of social change, achieving its ends by engaging audiences through pedagogy, incitement, and controversy and by building capacity in political organizations and networks. The history of interventionist political theater offers many examples of plays and perfor­ mances that impacted political events, but examples of plays that have demonstrably brought about political change are more rare. At the height of the Great Depression in Canada, a single performance of one such play—and its immediate suppression by the police—sparked a series of events that led to the rescinding of a repressive law that had been used to prosecute radicals and deport thousands of immigrants. At the same time, it was one stage in a larger metaperformance that began with a highly pub­ licized show trial, unfolded in the staging of Eight Men Speak in December 1933, and culminated a year later with the largest Communist Party rally in Canadian history. The foreword to the text of Eight Men Speak, published by the Canadian Labour Defence League (CLDL) shortly after the play was suppressed, demanded to know,”Why are the Canadian authorities afraid of this play?”1 Afraid they were, to the point that the prime minister of Canada personally intervened to have it banned by the Post Office. In the end, this act of censorship vastly multiplied the political impact of the play, aroused a major public controversy, and, as mentioned, led to the repeal of a harsh and arbitrary law. The law in question was Section 98 of the Criminal Code of Canada, which had been passed in 1919 in the aftermath of the Winnipeg general strike. That strike had shut down the western Canadian city, capital of the province of Manitoba, for a month and divided its culturally diverse po­ pulation, many of whom were immigrants from Eastern Europe. Prime Minister R. B. Bennett’s Conservative government was convinced that the strike was an act of revolutionary sedition incited by “alien” radicals. Struggling with labor strife across the country (caused by oppressive working conditions and high unemployment among soldiers returned from World War II), Bennett reacted by vowing to suppress socialism “under the heel of ruthlessness.”2 His government initiated a number of repressive DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-11

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mechanisms; the most famous was the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), formed from the merger of the North-West Mounted Police, which had patrolled the newly settled (which is to say, depopulated and stolen) lands of the western prairie provinces, and the small Dominion Police Force, which had jurisdiction in federal law. Costumed in the nowiconic red coat and anointed with invented tradition, the RCMP was in fact a political police force, and in its first decades, its primary mission was to track and infiltrate “subversive” organizations, especially the various com­ munist parties that popped up before they integrated into the Communist Party of Canada (CPC) in 1921. Those parties were legal, and there was no way for the government to proscribe them without evidence of illegality. Section 98 was designed to circumvent that impediment. It stipulated that any association, organization, society or corporation whose professed purpose or one of whose professed purposes is to bring about any governmental, industrial or economic change within Canada by use of force, violence or physical injury, or which teaches, advocates, advises or defends the use of force, violence, terrorism or physical injury to person or property, or threats of such injury, in order to accomplish such change, or for any other purpose, or which shall by any means prosecute or pursue such purpose or professed purpose, or shall so teach, advocate, advise or defend shall be an unlawful organization.3 Other clauses gave the police the power to search and seize property on suspicion without charge and the power to threaten theater and hall owners with fines and imprisonment for “renting a hall to a group that was later found to be an unlawful organization.”4 In his study of Section 98, Dennis Molinaro notes, “No procedures in the Code set out how a group could be classified as unlawful other than by a judicial determination in the context of a trial. This omission created the potential for an individual to be charged with being a member or officer of an unlawful organization without the organization having been previously classified as such by a lawful authority.”5 The law gave the government the arbitrary power of indictment under its terms. If a person were charged with advocating forceful change, a guilty verdict would be a de facto finding that the organization named in the indictment was “unlawful.” The enactment of Section 98 had a major influence on the formation of the Communist Party of Canada, which was founded in 1921 at a secret meeting of delegates from socialist parties, including representatives of the various ethnic communities (Ukrainian, Finnish, Jewish) that had mass socialist movements. The founding of the CPC and its quick recognition by the Communist International gave the RCMP a clear adversary. Harassment intensified after 1929, the year in which Joseph Stalin an­ nounced that communism had entered its Third Period of international class

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warfare. This led to the installation of Stalinist leaderships in the member parties of the Communist International, including in Canada, where Tim Buck assumed control of the party with the support of Moscow. This co­ incided with the implementation of the idea of Third Period communism, when international conditions were (as Stewart Smith, recently returned from advanced studies at the International Lenin School in Moscow, an­ nounced to the 1929 party convention) “intensifying and developing for a new frontal attack on the capitalist class of the world.”6 In effect, this was the declaration and stabilization of Stalin’s hegemony in communist parties around the world. Buck’s ascent to leadership followed a complex political battle of charges and countercharges that exposed various doctrinal and ethnic tensions in the party and precipitated a crisis of leadership. Deft political maneuvering, worthy of Stalin himself, gave Buck a majority of votes on the Political Committee—replicating a political process that was played out in similar scenarios in almost every member party of the Comintern, all of which re­ iterated Stalin’s consolidation of power in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the subtext of Third Period militancy. As Buck reported to the Comintern the next year, “The line of our struggle was to be for a complete re-orientation of the Party toward concrete struggles, organisation of the unorganised, independent political action, abolition of all the feder­ alistic remnants within the Party, and a sharper struggle against the Right tendencies of our language work.”7 The “federalistic remnants” were the Ukrainian, Finnish, and Jewish socialist parties that had been the organi­ zational base of the new Communist Party in 1921 but which were now, in accordance with Stalin’s policies on cultural minorities, subordinated to a party structure that valued unity rather than difference. This new, sharper struggle—which led the party’s young ideologue Stewart Smith to predict in 1928 that “in a very short time the streets of Toronto will be running with blood”—was predicted as the necessary result of what the Comintern called “growing ferment among the masses.”8 An integral part of Third Period strategy was the establishment of public groups through which the party could promote revolutionary action. It was in line with this strategy that the party established the two organizations that converged in Eight Men Speak. The first, and historically the most effective, was the Canadian Labor Defence League (the Canadian section of the International Red Aid, the “Shield of the Workers”), which had been founded in 1925, had then foundered, and was revived in 1929, under the directorship of Stewart Smith’s father, the Reverend A. E. Smith. The second was the Progressive Arts Clubs (PACs), which were established in branches across the country. The Toronto PAC, founded by the party’s cultural and youth organizer, Oscar Ryan, in 1931, numbered among its activities the cultural journal Masses and the Workers’ Experimental Theatre, a mobile agitprop troupe that performed at party rallies and picnics and toured to factory picket lines across Ontario. The only person in the

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troupe with professional theater training was Toby Gordon, who had spent two years in New York studying at the Yiddish-language theater school Artef and had recently returned home to Toronto. Gordon would play the CLDL lawyer who prosecutes the emblematic character Capitalism in the Workers’ Court that is the culminating act of Eight Men Speak. Eight Men Speak is perhaps the first Canadian instance of interventionist theater that complicates the political issues it dramatizes. Its subject is the imprisonment of eight prominent communists, including Tim Buck, under Section 98, and it played an instrumental role in the events that led to their release in 1934 and the repeal of the law in 1936. On August 11, 1931, a task force of the RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police, and Toronto Police Service arrested nine men in what was planned as a deathblow against the still legal Communist Party. Successful prosecution would result in a legal proscription against the party, rendering it unlawful. Such was the case when seven of the nine arrested men were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment; the eighth, Tom Čačić, was given two years prior to being deported to Yugoslavia. Only one of the nine, a seventeen-year-old member of the Young Communist League (YCL), was found innocent. Oscar Ryan, who was also publicity director of the CLDL, organized, a “workers’ jury” that met throughout the proceedings and issued a finding of “Not guilty.” A. E. Smith describes the workers’ jury in his autobiography: “They were selected by workers at con­ ferences held across the country. From far and wide, over Canada, they came to Toronto to fulfill the task given to them. That ‘jury’ was composed of two miners, a lumberjack, a machinist, an auto-mechanic, a draftsman, a printing pressman, a carpenter, a laborer, a laundress, a farmer and an unemployed worker for the Unemployed Association.”9 The workers’ jury was the seed of Eight Men Speak, which continued the strategy of a theatricalized coun­ terjudicial resistance to state power and relocated it from the courthouse to the stage. The eight men sentenced under Section 98 on November 13, 1931, re­ presented a cross-section of the upper leadership of the party; the exception was Čačić, a young organizer in the Croatian community, who was caught up in a raid on the offices of the Workers Unity League, the Communist Party’s trade union federation. Tim Buck was the general secretary of the party; Tom McEwen (known as Tom Ewen in the party and in Eight Men Speak) was the general secretary of the Workers’ Unity League; Malcolm Bruce, editor of The Worker, was a founding member of the One Big Union, a leading CPC organizer, and with Buck had been a delegate to the 1924 Comintern congress in Moscow; Sam Carr was the party’s organizational secretary; Tom Hill was a leader of the Finnish Organization of Canada, one of the principle language federations that provided the base of party membership; and Matthew Popovich and John Boychuk were leaders in the Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association. In his history of the early years of the Communist Party of Canada, Tim Buck describes the raids as synchronized:

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Alan Filewod The home of each member of the Political Bureau of the party and of other leading comrades, for example, John Boychuk, Toronto, were raided. In addition, the R.C.M.P. seized members of the Political Bureau wherever they happened to be at seven o’clock Eastern Standard Time that evening. Tom Hill was in a restaurant in Cochrane, Ontario. Malcolm Bruce was in Calgary; Sam Carr was in Vancouver. Revealing how close their undercover work had been, the Mounties went straight to the spot where each member of the Political Bureau was at the hour set for the arrests…. The raids on homes were by local, provincial and mounted police. They established a new low level for attempts at police intimida­ tion. Doors were broken open, clothing, bed linen, table linen, books, even the contents of kitchen cabinets, were strewn indiscriminately about the floors.10

Planned as a decapitating strike against communism, the arrests were the culmination of a long process of surveillance and infiltration that was co­ ordinated nationally by the RCMP in communication with agencies in the United Kingdom and the United States. In his detailed analysis of the trial, Molinaro points out that, according to the Crown, [it was] the CPC’s support for a proletarian revolution, coupled with its close relationship to Moscow, that made the CPC unlawful and hence its members guilty of belonging to an unlawful association. The CPC committed no violent act and the Crown never had to prove that it did to obtain a conviction. The Crown merely had to prove that the CPC’s teachings, i.e., the expression of its ideology, advocated violence. Not only was The Communist Manifesto evidence of the CPC’s unlawfulness, but if the party was found to be unlawful, one could not legally purchase a copy or other literature that contained communist teachings. As well, it would be a criminal act to attend Party meetings.11 With the finding of guilt, the eight were sentenced to five years of hard labor in the notorious Kingston Penitentiary, and the CPC was thereafter illegal. It would remain so until the end of the 1950s, although it was able to enter politics in the war years under the guise of the Labour Progressive Party. The arrests re-energized the Canadian Labour Defence League, which supplied bail (at $20,000 each) and legal assistance as well as launching a public campaign that would continue until the eight were released. On February 20, 1932, the prisoners began their sentences in Kingston. The riot that precipitated the events dramatized in Eight Men Speak took place on October 17 of that same year, when prisoners downed tools in protest against living conditions. A day later, from the courtyard, prison guards fired shots from a revolver and a rifle into Tim Buck’s cell while he was inside. As reported by the Toronto Star, Buck claimed in court that

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“a revolver bullet touched my hair. The rifle bullet passed very close.”12 When news of the shooting was made public by Buck’s wife, Alice, the leftwing press immediately interpreted it as a bungled assassination attempt; later the federal minister of justice admitted in Parliament that the shootings were deliberate but were only meant to frighten Buck. The news of the incident broke in the summer of 1933, when prison au­ thorities charged Buck with “incitement to riot.” After conducting his own defense in shackles, he was convicted and given an added sentence of one year. Together, the original trial and Buck’s retrial had the effect of legit­ imizing the Communist Party as a civil rights champion at a time when its membership was evaporating; it also gave Buck the aura of a folk hero, a status pushed by party propagandists (including two of the authors of Eight Men Speak). When the news of the shooting became public knowledge, the CLDL increased its public pressure on the Bennett government with a further round of mass meetings, culminating in congresses for the repeal of Section 98 in mid-November. On November 21, 1933, two weeks before Eight Men Speak opened, the CLDL leader the Reverend A. E. Smith, armed with the resolutions of those congresses and a petition with more than 200,000 signatures, led a deputation to demand the prime minister in­ vestigate into the shooting. They met with R. B. Bennett briefly in his office, but the meeting ended abruptly when Bennett refused to discuss the matter further and ordered them out. It was in this heated context that Oscar Ryan developed the idea of a theatrical response to the crisis. As an unlawful association, the Communist Party could not hold a meeting, and the CLDL campaign had to appear focused on the issue of Section 98 and civil rights. The first mention of the play is found in the CPC newspaper The Worker on October 28, under the headline “Workers’ Theatre Producing Strong Play”: “The Workers’ Theatre section of Progressive Arts Club announces the production, the second week in November of an important play featuring prison conditions, the prosecution of class war prisoners, and the attempt charged by Tim Buck on his life. The play written jointly by four members of the Progressive Arts Club is in six acts and involves a cast of some 40 persons.” A theatrical rally could enable the Communist Party to speak through the agency of dramatic representation. Oscar Ryan, who had been the Young Communist League representative on the party’s governing Political Committee, was one of Tim Buck’s closest supporters and a voting delegate to the party convention that brought the militant Stalinist faction led by Buck to power. Ryan was his nom de guerre; he had been born Oscar Weinstein but took an anglicized version of his mother’s maiden name, Rein, when he began working as a YCL organizer. As well as serving as publicity director for the CLDL, Ryan was also the party’s main cultural sector organizer in Toronto. In that capacity, he had been a founding member of the city’s Progressive Arts Club, the party’s attempt to bring radical intellectuals and worker artists into collaboration.

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He was also the founder and first editor of the radical cultural journal Masses, for which he used the nom de plume Maurice Granite. Later in his life, he served for thirty years as drama critic for the Communist Party paper the Canadian Tribune, writing as Martin Stone. Both names resonated with the hard edge of the communist fighter, modeled on Stalin, whose revolu­ tionary name was the Russian word for “steel.” He was a gifted pamphleteer and acerbic writer whose prose, characterized by plain idiomatic language, staccato rhythms, and fast punches, bears comparison to that of his American counterpart, Mike Gold. His style was aptly suited for quick, satiric agitprops and invective polemics, as in this savage account of the birth of R. B. Bennett: On July 3rd, 1870, the ocean seethed. At Hopewell, N.B., the earth groaned. Above, the heavens parted in fire. A babe was born into the comfortable household of Mr. and Mrs. Bennett. All who saw the little creature marvelled, not so much at its beet-red face and bellowing voice, but because of a strange phenomenon: For in one pudgy fist the child grasped a bag of gold and on one pink foot there grew a cast-iron heel. It was agreed to call the strange infant Richard (after Richard-the-LionHearted) and Bedford (after someone else).13 In developing Eight Men Speak, Ryan worked closely with the other party activist who became a co-author of the play. Edward Cecil-Smith was a professional journalist writing for The Worker, and like Ryan he had covered the trial of the Eight and served as editor of Masses. He was not a senior party official but was trusted by the leadership; later he would be sent to Spain as the political officer and subsequently com­ mander of the Canadian volunteer contingent in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion (the Mac-Paps). In 1933 he was the closest thing the party had to a cultural theorist (Figure 11.1). According to Frank Love, who is credited as a coauthor of Eight Men Speak under the name “H. Francis,” Ryan and Cecil-Smith worked together closely, distributing writing assignments and compiling the results.14 The dramatic representation of Tim Buck had to be handled with sensitivity, both for public relations effect and because of the emerging cult of per­ sonality within the party. Ryan, as an acolyte, friend, and later biographer of Buck, was the person responsible for the play up the party hierarchy and for ensuring the correct representation of the Eight on stage. In the fall of 1933, as the play came together in rehearsal with a cast comprised largely of unemployed workers, the special branch of the Toronto Police Service known as the Red Squad monitored it closely. In a 1976 in­ terview conducted by Don Rubin for the Ontario Historical Studies oral history project, Ryan described the close police presence:

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Figure 11.1 The final tableau of Eight Men Speak, staged in 1933, shows the members of the Worker’s Court angrily pointing at the cowering figure of Capitalism as they announce him guilty of the attempted murder of Canadian Communist leader Tim Buck. Photo Credit: Toby Gordon Ryan Collection, L. W. Conolly Theatre Archives, University of Guelph Library.

But periodically, the Red Squad would turn up at a rehearsal—and the Red Squad were people like Det. Sgt. William Nursey, Det. Dan Mann, Det. Simpson. These were great beefy types, six, seven feet or twenty feet tall…. There were very few directors who could conduct a rehearsal; with three or four cops, plainclothes detectives, standing there, grinning at you. Standing their with their arms akimbo saying, “Show us, boys!” and knowing, as some of the actors in the cast knew, that they could be deported because they were foreigners from England, from Scotland, from Ireland. They could be deported as vagrants.15 Detective Sargeant Nursey’s reports were sent to the Toronto police board of commissioners. On December 1, 1933, three days before the performance, the police commission board minutes contained this item: The Chief Constable submitted the report of Detective-Sergeant Nursey with reference to the play “Eight Men Speak” to be produced at the Standard Theatre by the Progressive Arts Club on Monday, December 4, 1933.

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From this, two facts can be discerned: that the Toronto police chose to allow the performance to proceed—possibly so that they could monitor the audience—and that the subsequent banning was not a response to the play but an unstated condition of its performance. Considered as a covert Communist Party rally, the single performance of Eight Men Speak was a success that enabled the audience to applaud the theatrical avatars of the Eight. The Standard Theatre, located on the east side of Spadina Avenue just north of Dundas Street, not far from grounds of the University of Toronto, was the Toronto stop on the Yiddish theater circuit, and although Ryan’s comments on police harassment refer to English, Scottish, and Irish foreigners, there was also a pervasive subtext of anti-Semitism in Toronto that gave the Standard Theatre venue an even more defiant aura. The packed audience appears to have been a mixture of activists, party supporters, and students. The only volatile incident was a kerfuffle when the band began playing “God Save the King,” as was re­ quired by law, and the audience responded with “catcalls and boos until the band switched to ‘The Internationale.’”17 What that audience saw was a composite text that brings together doc­ umentary sequences, agitprop, mass recitation, and expressionist fugue. It may be the clearest example in Canada of the brief moment when artistic and political radicalisms aligned in a vision of an artistic practice mobilized by proletarian modernism. It is also one of the earliest North American examples of radical modernist dramaturgy. It predates by almost three years the more famous Living Newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project in the United States and is roughly contemporary with the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre’s first version of Newsboy, which Al Saxe described in the New York magazine New Theatre as “a new form” and “one of the most pliable, dy­ namic theatre of action forms which has yet appeared.”18 Saxe’s theory that the rapid shifting of light, character, and tempo enacted the dialectics of the historical moment—“the feverish tempo of industrialization gone mad”—argued in effect that radical dramaturgy was a discovery of material principles rather than a received archive of genealogical forms.19 In both Eight Men Speak and Newsboy, we can identify techniques that virtually all histories of modern theater ascribe to European revolutionary modernists, particularly Vsevolod Meyerhold and Erwin Piscator. Their pioneering work in the 1920s popularized the theatricalist techniques of montage, projections, polyphony, mechanism, and compositional mise-enscène, but they did not invent these techniques; rather, they applied them to the institutional theater conditions of their respective metropolitan cultures in Moscow and Berlin. In a sense, they transformed spectatorial practices in an established theater profession by fusing revolutionary poli­ tics, radical content, and new theatricalist performance techniques by which

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mise-en-scène became the primary conduit of meaning in performance. These techniques cannot be attributed to any one source because they were synchronic responses to the two major technological developments that produced modernist theater practice over a generation: electric light and its consequence, cinema. Minute control over stage and house lighting made it possible to use it to develop scenography and gave playwrights the instru­ ments to break the causality of time and space. Instant blackouts, pinpoint spotlighting, and projection capacity, all of which fragmented narrative linearity, had become the composite vocabulary of expressionism by the end of the nineteenth century. With its innovative structure, narrative use of interruptive theatrical lighting, and quick, dynamic blackout scenes, Eight Men Speak is one of the first Canadian examples of the modernist theater in which the director functions as the author or conductor of the performance text. As a general principle, the play follows a montage structure in which scenes are presented through rhythmic and staging contradictions. Transitions tend to be abrupt and contradictory rather than smooth elisions. The play makes liberal use of blackouts, tightly focused and moving spotlights, gestic props (such as popup masks in a jury box), abrupt sound effects (such as the banging of a gavel), and tableaux. The surviving photograph of the final tableau is par­ ticularly interesting in this regard because its choreographic arrangement indicates a stylized physicality reminiscent of Soviet formalist performance; it offers a ghost memory of Toby Ryan’s experience of watching the highly drilled German-language agitprop troupe Proletbühne in New York. Eight Men Speak is billed as a play in six acts, but the acts are fairly short. Neither the script nor the program makes any mention of an intermission. (The play appeared in print months after the production, but the print version cannot be taken as unmediated evidence of what actually transpired on stage.) The play begins satirically, with the corrupt representatives of the governing classes (the prison warden, a reverend, a torch singer) in a garden party as they receive the news of the Kingston Penitentiary riot. Caught in the converging gazes of the audience and the party, the satire initiates the argument of the play by disallowing the moral and political legitimacy of the state. From this initial point of satire—which also serves, of course, to warm up the house—the play moves through an emotional register that concludes in triumphant anger in the final act, which returns to the trial format, charging Capitalism with the attempted murder of Buck. When looked at as an orchestration of emotional responses, we find a movement from ideo­ logical smugness (in the Red Scare parody of act 2, quoted below) to me­ lodramatic sentimentality (when Buck reads a letter from his daughter in his cell) to passionate anger in the careful rhythms of the monologues and mass chants of the imprisoned Eight. The polyphonic effect is carefully timed and fully exploits contemporary notions of experimental performance—as in the mass recitation in the dark that begins the second act and the use of lighting to isolate, move, and then

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unify the dramatic fugue later in that act. In a fugue structure, we are shown a series of blackout scenes, which are then reprised in shorter segments until they are brought together in an intensified choral climax. That moment is short enough to quote in its entirety in order to demonstrate the theatrical and dramatic effect: During this scene the spot from the projection room weaves up and down across the entire stage, revealing from right stage to left: Newspaper office, Street Car, Cabaret and the Old Man’s Room. The voices are shrill and follow quickly. EDITOR: Tim Buck riot leader! MAN IN CABARET: Buck said kill

the screws. Those Russians. YOUNG MAN IN STREET CAR: Com-yunists! RADIO: Buck’s complicity. The next set of voices follows immediately. They are louder and faster than the first set, almost overlapping each other. MAN IN CABARET: Buck said kill the screws! EDITOR: Tim Buck riot leader. YOUNG MAN IN STREET CAR: Com-yunists! WOMAN IN CABARET: Those Russians. RADIO: Buck’s complicity. The next set of voices are shouted simultaneously and are much louder. Each line is repeated three times and the chorus ends with “Buck’s complicity”. EDITOR: Tim Buck riot leader. MAN IN CABARET: Buck said kill the screws! WOMAN IN CABARET: Those Russians! YOUNG MAN IN STREET CAR: Com-yunists! RADIO: Buck’s complicity. As the last “Buck’s complicity” dies away, the Old Man’s voice can be heard. 20 OLD MAN (VERY HYSTERICALLY): Quick, Elizabeth! WOMAN IN CABARET:

At this point, the curtain drops, and when it reopens the scene has shifted to the trial of Tim Buck. Here documentary extracts from the trial record are framed in grotesque parody, and there ensues what seems to be the first use of puppetry—or actor-puppet interaction—in Canadian political interven­ tionist theater: Immediately the Mountie lifts the lid of the Jury Box, up pop SIX JURORS. These six Jurors are all clad in black and are visible only from the waist up. Each Juror wears an identical mask—that of a stodgy,

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vacant looking face. Each waves white gloves. When the lid is lifted, the six heads pop up with hands lifted.21 With scenes like this, Eight Men Speak is remarkably similar to the kinds of solutions radical theater makers would invent in counterculture collective creations a generation later. The play demonstrates a clever scenic imagi­ nation, yet the production had no trained designers, and a one-night stand on the stage of the Standard Theatre could permit only quickly built and easily changed set pieces. Years later, Toby Ryan remembered Eight Men Speak as “a bad play” because it lacked “unity’ (the most important dramatic element in the so­ cialist realist dramaturgy that superseded agitprop).22 But its portmanteau structure was an early example of the collective documentary theater that became common the 1960s and ’70s, and a number of later productions, by universities and political groups, have confirmed its theatrical effectiveness. It was so effective indeed that it had to be stopped. On December 7, Toronto’s chief constable presented Nursey’s report to the police commis­ sion, and three days later he submitted a fuller report. The commission ordered that it be sent to the crown attorney “in order that he may take such action as he may deem advisable in regard to it.” That included sending it to Ottawa; on December 20, R. C. Matthews, the minister of national revenue and Toronto’s representative in the federal cabinet, wrote to the prime minister with a complete dossier, including letters from the mayor of Toronto and the chief constable, internal police reports, a “report on the play, ‘Eight Men Speak’, dated 5th December,” the program from the theater, and a “description of cast of players known to the Police Department.”23 Two weeks later, Bennett’s secretary returned the file to Matthews with the note, “Mr. Bennett has read the file and thinks that appropriate action should be taken through the Attorney General of the Province to protect society against these attacks.” When plans were announced for a second performance in January 1934, the mechanism of censorship swung into action. On January 12, the University of Toronto student newspaper reported: According to the story given the Varsity by Mr. Cecil-Smith, the manager of the Standard Theatre was called to the parliament buildings yesterday and told by Mr. Buckley, Inspector of Theatres, that his license would be “cancelled forthwith” unless the production of the play was cancelled. When asked why the play would not go on, he was told, “We just don’t want it on. That’s all.”24 The Toronto Star picked up the story the next day and began to put the pieces together. It concluded its probe with a lead editorial on January 16 that ac­ cused the police commission of acting outside the law and admonished:

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Alan Filewod To set up a shortcut method such as this wherein a police request to ban a play will cause the provincial authority to ban it instantly, without asking questions, is indefensible. There is a growing police tendency to adopt plans by which they may evade the courts. This play about eight men deals with the trial of the eight Communists sent to prison from this city. It does not seem desirable that court trials should be parodied on the stage, but to prevent the undesirable by resorting to unlawful methods on the part of the authorities is more undesirable still because worse results can flow from it. This play it seems, was produced some time ago and little was heard of it. By banning it in a way that makes a brass band issue of it the police commission and Queen’s Park takes some chance of giving the play the advertising it wants.25

Although the mainstream press did not link the ban to political pressure from Ottawa, both Edward Cecil-Smith and A. E. Smith held Bennett re­ sponsible (Cecil-Smith “Foreword,” 3; Smith 167). A mass meeting at theToronto Labour Temple on January 14 passed a “Resolution on the Freedom of the Stage in Canada” that stated, “Such an attack on freedom of the stage was previously unknown in modern times in English speaking countries” and demanded that the ban on the play be rescinded and called for “full freedom for all workers’ cultural groups in Canada to carry on their artistic activities.”26 The resolution was sent to CLDL affiliates and radical organizations across the country; the poet Dorothy Livesay reprinted the version passed in Montreal in her memoir Right Hand, Left Hand.27 Within a week, Bennett’s office received a version of it from as far afield as a miners’ local union in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia (in which they seem to be unclear as to whether they were referring to a play or a film): Whereas it has been brought to out attention that a play known as (Eight Men Speak) has been prohibited by the government of Ontario and Whereas the play has been sponsored by the working class to show the inhuman treatment meted out to the eight political class war prisoners in Kingston Penitentiary and other working-class political prisoners, and Whereas, plays and motion pictures have been shown throughout Canada that we consider anything but moral. Young people of tender age have been subject to this immorality without any objection from any government. Whereas we feel that the action of the Ontario government in preventing this picture (Eight Men Speak) to be presented, shows that the capitalist class of this country wish to screen the prosecution of the political class war prisoners.28

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The authors of Eight Men Speak seized the opportunity to use the ban to further the CLDL program; instrumentally, the ban was more effective for the campaign than the suppressed performance would have been. As the CLDL’s publicity director, Ryan could see the tactical value of the con­ troversy. The CLDL had been campaigning vigorously for repeal since the original trial of the Eight, holding forty repeal conferences and distributing five million pamphlets and manifestos. The government was obdurate, but the banning of the play led to increased public pressure, wide press con­ demnation, and yet another sensationalized trial when the government charged A. E. Smith with sedition. Two nights after the performance, the events culminated in yet another packed meeting, at Hygeia Hall (where Emma Goldman used to deliver lectures) on Elm Street in Toronto. On this occasion both Cecil-Smith and A. E. Smith spoke, and the Workers’ Theatre (which had dropped “Experimental” from its name after its first year) performed act 4 of the play, the act in which the Eight speak in a mass recitation. It was at this meeting that Smith allegedly accused Bennett of ordering the attack on Buck. By his own account, he accused the government of conspiracy. He wasn’t wrong. The crown attorney attended a police commission meeting and spoke of a “proposed prosecution of A.E. Smith.” The chief constable presented the meeting with “a complete report of the address and of the part of the play.”29 At the end of January, Smith was indicted by a grand jury for sedition. The witnesses against him, according to the Star, were Detective Sargeants Nursey and Mann. According to the indictment, Smith was charged with saying, “Do you think it was an accident that those shots were fired? No. It was done on the direct orders of the Bennett government, and those orders were handed down until they came to Guthrie. I say deliber­ ately that Bennett gave the order to shoot Tim in his cell in cold blood with intent to murder him. I say this was no accident. It was an order given from Bennett to Guthrie, and from Guthrie to the warden.”30 In his memoir Smith alleges that the Red Squad deliberately distorted his words when he charged the government with “responsibility.”31 Smith’s trial was covered extensively in the press, which for the most part saw the issue as one of free speech. Its most dramatic moment was Buck’s own testimony, when he managed to get into the trial record the words “I was shot at.” The trial was a catalytic event for the CLDL’s campaign against Section 98, and following Smith’s acquittal (despite the judge’s in­ structions to the jury to convict) and the fall of the Bennett government, the new Liberal government of Mackenzie King repealed the law in 1936. In her memoir, Toby Gordon Ryan mentions that shortly after Eight Men Speak was shut down, she and Oscar went to Winnipeg for the better part of a year.32 Their presence in Winnipeg links the Toronto ban to the second instance of police censorship of Eight Men Speak. A second production of the play, by the Winnipeg Progressive Arts Club, directed by Joe Zuken, was canceled the day before its announced performance for May 2 at the Walker

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Theatre when the police, acting on instructions from the Manitoba attorney general, temporarily revoked the theater’s license. The stated reason for the cancellation was that the producer had reneged on a promise to let the police read the script of the play. Zuken denied any such promise, and as The Worker commented sarcastically, the police demand to see the script was “correctly refused, on the grounds that plays are only censored after their first appearance.”33 The chill persisted after the ban, when the PAC was denied the use of “seven or eight” theaters to hold a protest meeting.34 The attempt to produce Eight Men Speak in Winnipeg was thwarted, but it energized the radical theater movement in the city. Fred Narvey, a member of the cast, has stated that “in retrospect, this undemocratic action by City Hall was the best thing that could have happened to us. The dispute generated more discussion and sympathy than we could have possibly achieved with a play that was written, with the best of intentions, by a committee, and acted by a group of under-rehearsed amateurs.”35 Zuken later recalled that the ban provoked public outdoor demonstrations, and “segments of the play” were performed at various halls around the city.36 In effect, the ban decomposed the play and redistributed it as agitprop; as in Toronto, the ban was a multiplier that increased the reach and effect of the play. The government reacted by ordering the post office to ban the play from the mails. At the end of the year, the government quietly released Buck. His home­ coming was the triumphant finale to Eight Men Speak. The Communist Party rally staged at Maple Leaf Gardens to welcome him home on December 2, 1934—two days shy of a year after Eight Men Speak premiered—was a spectacle of power and solidarity, a combination of festival, political rally, and simulation of a mass movement, clearly marked by signifiers of Soviet power. The Toronto Star’s report captured the sense of elative performativity that filled the gardens to its capacity of 17,000 (with another 8,000 people standing outside): Youngsters wore red caps and the young pioneers from Fairbank looked like a small army of red riding hoods with berets crushed down on their heads and big red scarves around their necks. Some wore complete red costumes tinted with silver…. On the platform were baskets of red carnations and red roses and a wreath with long red taffeta streamers…. Thirty-four men in white trousers and gym shirts from the Workers’ Sporting Association carried Tim Buck shoulder high to the platform amid a storm of cheers. Behind came 14 young women in wine-colored knitted suits walking with military precision.37 The RCMP report confirms these details (except that it dresses the women in “black skirts with knitted, maroon sweaters”) and adds the presence of a “monstrous picture of Lenin and Stalin almost 40 feet long and 30 feet high. It was a contribution from the Progressive Arts Club.”38 Like

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the Soviet party congresses, the rally was an iconographic performance of leadership power. As a linked series of political performances, the original workers’ jury in 1931, the performance of Eight Men Speak in 1933, Smith’s talk and the partial performance in January 1934, the segmented performances in Winnipeg, and Buck’s mass rally comprise a three-year metaperformance. In each part, the fundamental dramaturgical logic recurs: the scenario of a paratheatrical public event organized around the figure of Tim Buck, framed in a representational dramatic simulation in a public relations campaign. They bring the very different venues of a provincial courtroom, a theater, a meeting hall, and a sports arena into the same scheme as linked stages in a distributed theatrical text. Each stage of this text enhanced the CLDL’s repeal campaign, and we can see this as the high watermark of the Communist moment in Canada. Molinaro argues, however, that the CLDL made a “crucial mistake”: “By reducing state repression to Section 98, by having the section become the symbol of repression, the movement’s win against the state did not cut very deep. The repeal movement focused on a law, on a symbol of repression and not the power that created that law and that repression.”39 Eight Men Speak offers a case study in the plural ways in which political intervention theater affects change. Efficacy may be measured against re­ sults, but there is rarely a straight line from cause to effect, and results are slippery and never singular. In that sense, all political theater is in­ determinate, succeeding in some ways and failing in others. Eight Men Speak made a definable political change in two ways: firstly, by provoking a series of police and judicial responses that amplified the CLDL’s campaign and resulted in the repeal of Section 98; and secondly, by popularizing a hagiographic image of Tim Buck that greatly enhanced public support of the banned party. But its successes were also its failures, because it was the banning of the play, not its performance, that made the difference—and in the long run, that difference proved to be less meaningful than it seemed at the time. When the new government of Mackenzie King finally overturned Section 98 after coming to office in 1935, it replaced the law’s key provisions with countervailing changes to other sections of the criminal code that expanded powers to deport noncitizens and strip citizenship from im­ migrants. Today, nine decades later, even these seem tame compared to the antiterrorism powers reserved by the modern security state.

Notes 1 Edward Cecil-Smith, foreword to Eight Men Speak by Oscar Ryan, E. CecilSmith, H. Francis, and Mildred Goldberg, ed. Alan Filewod (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2012), 5. 2 Daniel Francis, Seeing Red: The Red Scare of 1918–1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010), 241.

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3 Thomas Berger, Fragile Freedoms: Human Rights and Dissent in Canada (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1981), 132–33. 4 Dennis Molinaro, “State Repression and Political Deportation in Canada, 1919–1936” (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2015), 43. 5 Ibid. 6 Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada (Montreal: Vanguard, 1981), 237. 7 Ibid., 364–65. 8 Ibid., 258–59. 9 A. E. Smith, All My Life (Toronto: Progress Books, 1972), 133. 10 Tim Buck, Thirty Years: 1922–1952 (Toronto: Progress Books, 1952), 83–84. 11 Molinaro, “State Repression,” 188. 12 “‘I Was Shot At’ Buck Says but Court Rules Out Prison Riot Evidence,” Toronto Daily Star, March 6, 1934. 13 Oscar Ryan, The “Sedition” of A. E. Smith (Toronto: Canadian Labor Defence League, 1934), 3. 14 Elaine M. Baetz, “The Role of the Working Class in Eight Men Speak” (MA thesis, University of Guelph, 1988), 45. 15 Oscar Ryan and Toby Ryan, interview by Don Rubin, June 23, 1976 (transcript), Ontario historical studies series, RG 47-27-2–32): 32–33, Archives of Ontario, Toronto. 16 Toronto Police Commission, Minutes, 1933–1934, Toronto Police Archives. 17 “Sing Out ‘Red Flag,’ Hiss and Boo Anthem: Standard Theatre Crowd See Satire on Tim Buck’s Imprisonment,” Toronto Daily Star, December 5, 1933. 18 Alfred Saxe, “Newsboy—From Script to Performance,” in Theatres of the Left, 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America, ed. Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 289. 19 Ibid., 290. 20 Ryan et al., Eight Men Speak, 22–23. 21 Ibid., 24. 22 Alan Filewod, “The Comintern and the Canon: Workers’ Theatre, Eight Men Speak, and the Genealogy of Mise-en-Scène,” Australasian Drama Studies 29 (October 1996): 20. 23 “Communists,” Document 96810-3, File C, Box 146, R. B. Bennett Papers, MG H96, Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick Archives and Special Collections, Fredericton. 24 “‘Eight Men Speak’ Is Canceled Due to Political Interference,” The Varsity, January 12, 1934. 25 “The Banning of a Play Which Gave Distaste,” Toronto Daily Star, January 15, 1934. 26 “Resolution on the Freedom of the Stage in Canada,” Toby Gordon Ryan Papers, XZ1 MS AO18 000075, University of Guelph Archival and Special Collections, Ontario. 27 Dorothy Livesay, Right Hand, Left Hand (Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1977), 80–82. 28 “Communists,” R. B. Bennett Papers. 29 Toronto Police Commission, Minutes. 30 “Rev. A. E. Smith Avoids Meeting after True Bill,” Toronto Daily Star, January 31, 1934. 31 Smith, All My Life, 132. 32 Toby Gordon Ryan, Stage Left: Canadian Theatre in the Thirties, a Memoir (Toronto: CTR Publications, 1981), 47.

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33 “‘Eight Men Speak’ Drama Is Banned in Winnipeg,” The Worker, May 12, 1934. 34 “Club Is Denied Use of Civic Auditorium for Protest Meeting,” Winnipeg Free Press, May 12, 1934. 35 Fred Narvey, “A Jewish Radical Remembers,” Outlook Magazine (November–D ecember 2001), www.vcn.bc.ca/outlook/library/articles/jewsontheleft/p05Jewish RadicalRemembers. 36 Doug Smith, Joe Zuken: Citizen and Socialist (Toronto: James Lorimer and Sons, 1990), 55. 37 “Tim Buck Cheered by 17,000 at Communist Gathering,” Toronto Daily Star, December 3, 1934. 38 Gregory Kealey and Reg Whitaker, eds., RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part 1, 1933–1934 (St. John’s, Newfoundland: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1993), 440. 39 Dennis Molinaro, An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919–1936 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 219.

Bibliography Angus, Ian. Canadian Bolsheviks: The Early Years of the Communist Party of Canada. Montreal: Vanguard, 1981. Baetz, Elaine M. The Role of the Working Class in Eight Men Speak. MA thesis, University of Guelph, 1988. Berger, Thomas. Fragile Freedoms: Human Rights and Dissent in Canada. Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, 1981. Buck, Tim. Thirty Years: 1922–1952. Toronto: Progress Books, 1952. “Club Is Denied Use of Civic Auditorium for Protest Meeting.” Winnipeg Free Press, May 12, 1934. “Communists.” Document 96810-3, File C, Box 146, R. B. Bennett Papers, MG H96. Harriet Irving Library, University of New Brunswick Archives and Special Collections, Fredericton. “‘Eight Men Speak’ Drama Is Banned in Winnipeg.” The Worker, May 12, 1934. “‘Eight Men Speak’ Is Canceled Due to Political Interference.” The Varsity, January 12, 1934. Filewod, Alan. “The Comintern and the Canon: Workers’ Theatre, Eight Men Speak, and the Genealogy of Mise-en-Scène.” Australasian Drama Studies 29 (October 1996): 17–32. Francis, Daniel. Seeing Red: The Red Scare of 1918–1919, Canada’s First War on Terror. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010. “‘I Was Shot At”’ Buck Says but Court Rules Prison Riot Evidence.” Toronto Daily Star, March 6, 1934. Kealey, Gregory, and Reg Whitaker, eds. RCMP Security Bulletins: The Depression Years, Part 1, 1933–1934. St. John’s, Newfoundland: Canadian Committee on Labour History, 1993. Livesay, Dorothy. Right Hand, Left Hand. Erin, Ontario: Press Porcepic, 1977. Molinaro, Dennis. An Exceptional Law: Section 98 and the Emergency State, 1919–1936. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017.

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Molinaro, Dennis. “State Repression and Political Deportation in Canada, 1919–1936.” PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2015. Narvey, Fred. “A Jewish Radical Remembers.” Outlook Magazine, November–D ecember 2001. www.vcn.bc.ca/outlook/library/articles/jewsontheleft/p05Jewish RadicalRemembers. “Resolution on the Freedom of the Stage in Canada.” Toby Gordon Ryan Papers, XZ1 MS AO18 000075. University of Guelph Archival and Special Collections, Ontario. “Rev. A. E. Smith Avoids Meeting after True Bill.” Toronto Daily Star, January 31, 1934. Ryan, Oscar. The “Sedition” of A. E. Smith. Toronto: Canadian Labor Defence League, 1934. Ryan, Oscar, E. Cecil-Smith, H. Francis, and Mildred Goldberg. Eight Men Speak: A Political Play in Six Acts. Toronto: Progressive Arts Club, 1934. Ryan, Oscar, E. Cecil-Smith, H. Francis, and Mildred Goldberg. Eight Men Speak, edited by Alan Filewod. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2012. Ryan, Oscar, and Toby Ryan. Interview by Don Rubin, June 23, 1976 (transcript). Ontario historical studies series, RG 47-27-2-32): 32–33. Archives of Ontario, Toronto. Ryan, Toby Gordon. Stage Left: Canadian Theatre in the Thirties, a Memoir. Toronto: CTR Publications, 1981. Saxe, Alfred. “Newsboy—From Script to Performance.” In Theatres of the Left, 1880–1935: Workers’ Theatre Movements in Britain and America, edited by Raphael Samuel, Ewan MacColl, and Stuart Cosgrove. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, 289–96. “Sing Out ‘Red Flag,’ Hiss and Boo Anthem: Standard Theatre Crowd See Satire on Tim Buck’s Imprisonment.” Toronto Daily Star, December 5, 1933. Smith, A. E. All My Life. Toronto: Progress Books, 1972. Smith, Doug. Joe Zuken: Citizen and Socialist. Toronto: James Lorimer and Sons, 1990. “The Banning of a Play Which Gave Distaste.” Toronto Daily Star, January 15, 1934. “Tim Buck Cheered by 17,000 at Communist Gathering.” Toronto Daily Star, December 3, 1934. Toronto Police Commission. Minutes, 1933–1934. Toronto Police Archives.

Index

A Abiayala (land of vital potential): in Native American and Indigenous studies 103–104; oppression of LGBTIQ+ people across 105; selfidentification with 102–103 Accilien, Cécile 14, 15 Acree, William 12, 34 acrobatic shows 22, 39, 43 activist-actor 8 activist performances 1 act of playing Creole 12 ACT-UP 2 Adamovsky, Ezequiel 25, 28 Adorno, Pedro 138, 139 Adyanthaya, Aravind Enrique 139 agitprop 17 Agua, Sol y Sereno (ASYS) 15, 132, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 148 AIDS epidemic 179 alabaos (mourning songs) 13 alabos (praises chanted a capella) 83–84, 85, 86–87, 88, 96 Alexander, Frederick Matthias 66 Al Jazeera news agency 183 Allen, Chadwick 104 Alzate, Gastón 13, 91 Amigo, Roberto 96 Amnesty International 102, 105, 112, 165, 166 Anamú 136 Anatomías del deseo negado 113 Anzaldúa, Gloria 118, 195 Arakaki, Yuriko 43, 45, 46 Arce, Alejandro 41 Archetti, Eduardo P. 26 The Archive and the Repertoire (Taylor) 171

Arenas, Reinaldo 168 Arenas Carter, Rodrigo 14, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 112 Arendt, Hannah 193 Areyto 134 Argentinian military dictatorship (1976–1983) 38 Arias, Arturo 101, 102 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand 120, 121 Arocho del Toro, Gonzalo 134 Arriví, Francisco 134, 135 Asprilla, Leyner Palacios 90 Atlantic 2 Avendaño, Bruno 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 184, 191, 192, 194, 196 Avendaño, Felipa Martínez 193–194 Avendaño, Lukas 16, 17, 175–196 Avendaño Martínez, Bruno Alonso 17 Aztec mythology 10 B Balança a raba (booty-shaking) choreography 59–60, 69–70 Ballester, Manuel Méndez 134 “Bambalinas: El auge de una modalidad teatral-periodistica” (Mazziotti) 30 Bartenieff, Irmgard 66 “BASTA: Reactivating Bodies and the Dramaturgy of Femicides in Argentina” (Hernández) 11, 12, 39, 43, 44–45, 46, 47, 49, 52 Basualdo, Carlos 91, 92 “Basura” (Cabezón Cámara) 50–51 Bathing Beauty (movie) 155 Batista, Fulgencio 16, 160, 165 Battle in Seattle (1999) 2 Baudelaire, Charles 122 Bejarano, Cynthia 40

222

Index

Belafonte, Harry 122 Belaval, Emilio S. 134 Benavides, Luis Fernando 94, 95 Bennett, R. B. 202, 208, 213, 214, 215 Benson, Peter 102, 105 Berdecía, Fernando Sierra 134 Bermúdez, César 165 Bernabé, Jean 117 Berotte Joseph, Carole M. 120 Beuys, Joseph 91, 95 Bharucha, Rustom 79, 81, 85 Biden, Joe 6 Bikel, Ofra 171 biopolitics (power over life) 18 Bjarkman, Peter C. 154 Black Lives Matter 7 black sociality 65 blending of poetry and music 121, 122 Blitzer, Wolf 9 Bofill, Sylvia 133 Bojayá massacre (May, 2, 2002 Colombia) 81, 82, 85, 88, 89, 90 Bolsonaro, Jair 59, 60, 62 Bonilla, Pedro Iván 139, 145, 146 Bookey, Blaine 102, 106 “Border Arte: Nepantla, el Lugar de la Frontera” (Anzaldúa) 195 Borderlands/La Frontera (Anzaldúa) 119 Botero, Jerónimo 81, 82, 87, 88, 95 Boukan Ginen 120 Boukman Eksperyans 120 Bourne, Peter G. 156, 157 Boychuk, John 205, 206 Boyd, Andrew 2 Brau, Salvador 133 Bread and Puppet Theater (New York) 137, 145 Brecht, Bertolt 10 Brecht de Brecht (El Tajo) 135 Brooks, Peter 136 Bruce, Malcolm 205, 206 Bruguera, Tania 169, 170 Buck, Alice 207 Buck, Tim 17, 204, 205, 206, 207, 212, 216, 217 Burdette, Hannah 103 Buscando a Bruno (Avendaño) 176, 184, 185–186, 188–189, 191, 193, 196 Butler, Judith 45, 65 Butterfly Utopia (Avendaño) 16, 17 Byrd, Jodi A. 103

C Cabezón Cámara, Gabriela 50, 51, 52 Čačić, Tom 205 Calderón, Felipe 7, 180 Caminero-Santangelo, Marta 16 Camnitzer, Luis 169 Campechada 141–142 Campeche, José 142 Canadian Labour Defence League (CLDL) 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 214, 215, 217 Canadian Tribune 208 Canady, Darren 5–6, 7 Canady, Linda 6 Canales, Nemesio R. 133 Candelas Ramírez, Roberto 182 Cantinflas (Mario Fortino Alfonso Moreno Reyes) 10 Capetillo, Luisa 133–134 Cárcamo-Huechante, Luis E. 102 Cardona, Javier 139 Carlo Brothers 22 Carnaval no Inferno (Carnival in Hell) 12, 59; as part of noncommercial queer partying 62; as supersize family performance 68 Carnival, Brazil 12, 13, 59; as force for political activism 59; happy encounter narrative 61; queer carnivalesque in 59; racist and homophobic logic in 62 carnivalesque performativity 12–13 Carr, Sam 205, 206 Casas, Francisco (a.k.a. Yeguas del Apocalipsis) 178 “The Case for Reparations” (Coates) 2 Casimir 126–127 Castro, Fidelito 156 Castro, Raúl 170, 171 Castro Fidel 16, 154–167 Castro Soto, Gustavo 182 Catafixia 100 Cavaye, Ronald 185 Cecil-Smith, Edward 214, 215 Césaire, Aimé 118 cha’anil (Indigenous Maya concept) 100, 101; explanation for 106–107; performance 106–107 Chaca, Roselia 183 Chacón, Gloria E. 101 Chamoiseau, Patrick 117 Charlemagne, Manno 120

Index 223 charro 22 Chávez, César 10, 11 Chávez, Susana 40 Cherokee peoples 103 Chickasaw peoples 103 choreopolitical movement 67–68 Chub, Miriam Carolina 112 circus companies 22, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30 Civil Rights Act (1964) 4 Clary, Mike 171 Club Dramático del Ateneo Puertorriqueño 134 Club Dramático del Casino de Puerto Rica 134 CnI 64, 70, 73–74 Coates, Ta-Nehisi 2 Cocoliches character 28 Cohen, Steven 161, 162 Cold War 16, 159, 175, 176 Colectivo Moriviví 136 collective theatre 139–140 colonialism 71, 140–141, 143 The Color of Law (Rothstein) 3 Comedia Universitaria 135 Comer (ASYS) 143 Committee of Experts on Violence (CEVI) 40 Communist Party of Canada 17, 202, 203–204, 205, 206, 207, 210, 216 communitas of pain 17 Comuneros de San Mateo del Mar, 183 Conaway, Janelle 106 Confiant, Raphaël 117 Connor, Eugene “Bull” 4 Contemporary Puerto Ricsan Drama (Phillips) 137 Conway, Christopher B. 22 Conway, Janelle 102 Costa, Pablo Assumpçāo Barros 12, 13 costumed dance comparsas 28 counterweights 2 COVID pandemic 6, 41, 52, 132, 190, 192 Cox, James H. 104 Creole griotte 122–123 Creole social clubs 12, 20–22 Creole songs 14 Creole spirit 30 Créolité (creoleness) 117–118; exchange and mixture of cultures at heart of 119; linguistic pride in 119

creolization 117–118; parallel to Caribbeanness 118 Crespo, Miguel J. 193 crisis actors 8–9 Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (Muñoz) 168 Cruz, Celia 122 Cruz Varela, Maria Elena 166 La cuarterona (Tapia y Rivera) 133 Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts (Lima) 156 Cuerpos technológicos (art installation, Tzoc Bucup) 100 Cutendencia (Y No Había Luz) 144 D D’Almeida, Irène 123 Damas, Léon-Gontran 118 Darío, Rubén 28 Dávila Santiago, Rubén 138 Day, Stuart A. 22 Day of Remembrance for Truth and Justice (Argentina) 43 Debussy, Claude 122 Declaration on Femicide (OAS, 2008) 40, 41 de Falla, Manuel 144 Défilée 15, 117, 126 DeGraff, Michel 120 Dejean, Yves 120 de la Torre, Gonzalo 84 Delgado, Cinthia 183 del Valle Escalante, Emilio 102 Demesmin, Carole (a.k.a. Mother of Haiti) 14, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121–128 DePalma, Anthony 157, 158 DesInformémonos 183 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques 126 Díaz, Porfirio 181 Díaz-Balart, Mirta 156, 157 Díaz-Canel, Miguel 171 Didi-Huberman, Georges 193 Diéguez, Ileana 17, 184, 186, 193 Disappearance 11, 16–17, 38–43, 81, 95–96 Dominique, Jean 117 dramas criollos (Creole dramas) 12, 20–22, 23; marketing and 28–30; popular dances in 26–27; as social events 27; troupe 24 Driskill, Qwo-Li 104

224

Index

Duque, Iván 90, 95, 96 Durand, Oswald 121 E Early Works (Valdez) 10 Easy to Wed (movie) 155 Eight Men Speak (Ryan et. al.) 17, 202, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211–213, 214, 215, 216, 217 El Gran Quince 136 Elizabeth II, queen 158 Éloge de la Créolité (In Praise of Creoleness) manifesto 117–118 El Paysandú 27 El Tajo del Alacrán 135, 137 El Universal 180 Emberá peoples (Colombia) 82 embodiment practices 87–88 Emeric, Rafael Cruz 134 Eshun, Kodwo 71 Espinosa, Victoria 135 Eureka Committee (Mexico) 177 Expresión MoLE 11, 38, 52; acrobatic practices to focus on mistreatment of female bodies 39; female body as disposable 45, 50–53; joined forces with Ni Una Menos (NUM) 42–43; name as indicator of goals 39 Ezeiza, Gabino 26 F Fanon, Frantz 67, 70 farmworkers’ movement (US) 11 Fatiman, Cécile 117, 126 Federal Housing Administration (FHA) 3 Federal Theatre Project (US) 210 Feldenkrais, Moshe 66 Felman, Shoshana 7 femicide 38; Argentinian legal system and 39–40; changed to feminicide 40; change in public understanding of 41; as consequence of US militarization of Mexican border 49; dramaturgy of 47–50; hypervisibility of 43; numbers of in Latin America and the Caribbean 39–40; women’s bodies as trash 50–53 feminicide 39, 40 feminist movement in Argentina 38 Feria Internacional del Libro en Guatemala/Runimaq’ij ri Wuj chi Iximulew (FILGUA) 112

Fernandes, Sujatha 168, 169 Ferrari, Carlos 137 Ferreira da Silva, Denise 59, 70 Festival Internacional de Cine y Communicación de los Pueblos Indígenas/Originarios (FICMAYAB) 112 Fierro, Martín 28 fiesta criolla (Montevideo) 12, 20 Fiet, Lowell 131, 133, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 143 Filewod, Alan 17, 18 Finnish Organization of Canada 205 Flon, Catherine 15, 117, 126 Floyd, George 5 folk dances 26, 27 Follow-up Mechanism to the Belém do Pará Convention (MESECVI) 40 Forgotten Hollywood History (blog) 154–155 Foucault, Michel 18 Fragments (Salcedo art installation) 13, 90, 91–93, 95, 96 Freedom Elections (Mississippi, 1963) 3 Freedom Rides (1961) 4 Fregoso, Rosa-Linda 40, 42 Fuentes, Marcela A. 40, 41 fugitive planning 65 G Gámez Torres, Nora 170 García, Lia 175, 183 gaucho dramas 22, 23, 33 El Gaucho Martín Fierro (J. Hernández) 23 Gay(o) (Tzoc Bucup) 100 gender as enacted 65 gendered violence 102 Giammattei, Alejandro 102 Gil, Amado 166 Gilroy, Paul 71 Giroux, Henry A. 7 Glissant, Édouard 118 globalization 49 Global South 79–80 Godard, Hubert 66, 67 Gold, Mike 208 Goldin, Liliana 102, 106 Goldman, Emma 215 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 185 González, Beatriz 91 González, Emma 8, 9 González, Lydia Milagros 135

Index 225 González, Nilda 133 Gordon, Tony 205 gore capitalism 180–181 Granda, Julian 138 grape strike and boycott, Delano, California (1965–1970) 10, 11 grassroots organizations: efficacy of 1; linked to theater 11 Great Depression in Canada 202 Green, James 62 Griswold del Castillo, Richard 10, 11 Grupo de Teatro Malayerba (Ecuador) 136 Grupo Gay da Bahia 60 Grupo Teatro Escambray (Cuba) 136 Guerra, Lillian 164, 165, 167 Guevara, Che 158 Gugliotta, Guy 164 Guna General Congress 103 Guna peoples 102, 103 Gutiérrez, Eduardo 23 H Haglund, Sue 103 Haitian Creole 116, 117; as revolutionary language 119–120 Haitian Creole Academy 119 The Haitian Creole Language (eds. Spears & Berotte Joseph) 120 Hansen, Jonathan M. 156, 157 happy encounter narrative 13 Harding, James Martin 136, 138 Harney, Stefano 59, 65, 66, 70, 72 Havana after Midnight (movie) 157 Helfeld, Nami 139, 145, 146 Helfeld, Yari 146 hemispheric entertainment flows 22 Hemispheric Institute Digital Video Library (HIDVL) 100, 101, 110; Facebook and 111 Henry, Aaron 3 Hernández, José 23 Hernández, Paola 11 Hernández, Teresa 139 HIJOS 4, 5 Hill, Tom 205, 206 Historical Memory Group Report on Bojayá (Colombia, 2010) 81, 85 Holiday in Mexico (movie) 155 homophobia 59, 61, 62, 195 Hotel Juárez: Dramaturgia de feminicidios (ed. Mijares) 47

Las Housewives de Miramar (Teatro Breve) 140 housing cooperatives 3 Hunt, Deborah 139, 144, 146, 148 Hurricane Maria, Puerto Rico (September 20, 2018) 15–16, 140 Hutcheon, Linda 10 I Ibarguen, Alexa Raye 169, 170 Ibarra de Piedra, Rosario 177 ignorance is a passion (Lacan) 7 Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies (Giroux) 7 Indigenous Cosmolectics: Kab’awil and the Making of Maya and Zapotec Literatures (Chacón) 101 institutionalized racial erasure 61 Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña 142 Interethnic Truth Commission for the Pacific Region 90 International Centre for Theatre Research (Paris) 136 International Dance Biennale of Ceará (2018) 64 International Red Aid 204 International Women’s Day 44 Irony’s Edge (Hutcheon) 10 J Japanese kabuki 185 Johnson, Lyndon 4 La Jornada 180 Juan Cuello (Gutiérrez) 24 Juan Moreira (Gutiérrez) 23, 24, 26, 35 Juárez, Pilar 182 Justice, Daniel Heath 103, 104 Justicia para Nuestras Hijas (Justice for Our Daughters) 42 K Kahlo, Frida 176, 178 Kasky, Cameron 9 Kennedy, John F. 4 Kershaw, Baz 47 K’iche’ Maya performance art 107 kinetic structure 66, 68–69 King, Mackenzie 215, 217 King, Martin Luther, Jr 4, 11 Kingston Trio 122 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 93 Klein, Teodoro 24

226

Index

L Labour Progressive Party 206 Lacan, Jacques 7 La Farándula Obrera 134 La Farándula Universitaria 134 LaFountain-Stoke, Lawrence 186 Lagarde y de los Ríos, Marcela 40 Lamartinière, Marie-Jeanne 15, 117, 126 La Pocha Nostra 185 Lara, Mabel 88 Las dos Fridas (Kahlo painting) 178, 179 Las Nietas de Nonó 137 LasTesis 52 Lavendaro, Leopoldo Santiago 134 Lawouze (Demesmin) 117 Lehmann-Nitsche, Robert 31 Lembel, Pedro 178, 179 Lepecki, André 67, 68, 71 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex people (LGBTI) 105 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, or questioning (LGBTIQ+) 12, 14, 41, 46, 99, 100, 175; conflicting attitudes towards Guatemalan 105; Indigenous 101, 104; shared oppression of through the Americas 104; violence in Guatemala for 102 lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) 62, 63; hate crimes against Brazilian community 60–61 Lesbian Avengers 2 Les Fréres Dejean 120 Les Fréres Parents 120 Lewa, Feliks Moriso (Félix MorisseauLeroy) 117 libros cartoneros (artisan books) 100 Libros de Chilam Balam 105 Livesay, Dorothy 214 Living Theatre (New York) 136 Llamado a la autoridad (Avendaño) 176, 186–188, 189, 191, 192, 196 Llanes, Ricardo M. 30 Llanes Ortiz, Genner 100, 106, 107, 108 lo criollo 23 Longoni, Ana 79, 96 López Obrador, Andrés Manuel 7, 9, 10, 182 Los Angeles Times 159 Los Guachitos (Regules) 30 Love, Frank 208 Lozano de la Pola, Rainsares 185

Lxs idiotas (Bofill) 133 M Madame Gabia (Avendaño) 191 Madero, Abel Sierra 154, 157, 158, 159, 165, 166, 167 Madonna 68 Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo) 4, 5, 11, 38, 42, 175, 177 Maisonet, Luis 135 Malcolm X 162 La Maleta Ilegal 100 Mallarmé, Stéphane 122 Mamani, Takir 102–103 Manzo, Diana 183, 196 Mapou, Jan (Jean-Marie Willer Denis) 120 Marial, José 25 Marín, Paola 13 Maroulé (Demesmin) 117 Márquez, Rosa Luisa 137, 138, 139, 145 Martin, Randy 70 Martineau, Jean-Claude 14, 117, 121, 126, 127 Martinez, Morán 134 Martín Fierro (Regules) 31 Martin Luther King’s Birmingham Campaign (1963) 4 Martorell, Antonio 137, 138 Masses 204, 208 mass shooting, Marjory Stoneman High School, Parkland, Florida 8, 9 mass shooting, Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut 9 Matías, Pedro 183 Mauvaise Conduite (documentary film) 165, 167 Maya, Adriana 83 Maya cosmogony 99 Mazziotti, Nora 30 Mbembe, Joseph-Achille 18, 43, 70, 71, 73 McAllister, Carlota 102, 105 McEwen, Tom (a.k.a. Tom Ewen) 205 McLane-Ocampo Treaty (1859) (a.k.a. Treaty of Transit and Commerce) 181 McMillen, Neil R. 3, 4 “Meditation” (Canady) 6 Meléndez, Priscilla 15 metaphors, theatre 3, 16 Mexican Revolution 22

Index 227 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 210 Miami Herald 158 Michel, Emeline 120 Mignolo, Walter 195, 196 Miguel, Pedro 181 Mijares, Enrique 47 Miller, Ivor L. 161 Miller, Michael E. 8 Miller, Tiffany D. Creegan 14 Mills Brothers 122 mindful movement 66 mise-en-scène 211 Mitchell, Dave Oswald 2 modernist theatre 211 Molinaro, Dennis 203, 206 Monstra 64, 66 Morales, Julio 147 Morales Trujillo, Hilda 102, 106 Morán, Sandra 14, 102 Moreira, Juan 28 Moreno, María 47 Moreno, Zora 136 Morfi, Angelina 133 Morgensen, Scott Lauria 104 Mosquera, Saulo Enrique 86 Moten, Fred 59, 65, 66, 70, 72 Mouvman Kreyòl Ayisyen (Haitian Creole Movement) 120 Muñoz, José Esteban 168, 183–184, 186 Muñoz, Victor 16 Musalo, Karen 102, 106 muxe artist 16, 178–179 muxeidad (muxeity) 176–177, 178 N Nahmad, Salomón 182 Narvey, Fred 216 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 3, 8, 162 National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) 188 National Commission for Reparation and Reconciliation (Colombia) 81 National Historical Memory Center (Colombia) 90 National Liberation Army (ELN) 89 National Rifle Association (NRA) 1, 8, 9 nativism 21, 22 Navarra, Gilda 137 Navarro, Wendy 169

Necropolitics (Mbembe) 18, 43, 59, 68–74; in Colombia 79 Négritude 118 Nelson, Diane 102, 105 Never Again movement 9 New Republic 161 Newsboy (Workers’ Laboratory Theatre) 210 New Theatre magazine 210 New Yorker 9 New York Times 158, 159 Nigro, Kirsten 110 Ni Una Menos (NUM) (Not One Woman Less) 11, 38, 52; as all-female ensemble 38; hashtag performativity of 40–41; joined forces with Expresión MoLE 42–43; platform for other artists to promote social change 40, 41; slogans make it a central feminist movement 41–42; started as cultural event motivated by indignation 40 No soy persona, soy mariposa (Avendaño) 194 Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home) 42 Nuevo Teatro Pobre de América 135 Nursey, William 209, 215 O Obama, Barack 1 objectivization of female bodies 51–52 Octavio, Joaquín 144, 146, 147 Odin Teatret (Denmark) 136 Offit, Thomas 102, 105 Olander, Marcia 91 Oliveira, Eduardo 68, 71 Oliven, Ruben 22, 31 Olodum 61 One Big Union 205 The One Year Book of Amazing Stories: 365 Days of Seeing God's Hand in Unlikely Places (Petterson) 155 Ontario Historical Studies 208 oral poetry 120–121 Organization of American States (OAS) 40 Oropeza, Daliri 182 Osornio, Felipe (a.k.a. Lechedevirgen Trimegisto) 175, 194 Otero, Maritza Pérez 139 “The Other Occupation: The Haitian

228

Index

Version of Apartheid” (Martineau) 121 P Palacios, Rita M. 100, 101 Palmeiro, Cecilia 41 parodies 9–10 La pasión según Antígona Pérez (L. R. Sánchez) 135 La Patria Argentina 23 patriarchy 15, 178; in Haiti 116 payada scene 26 Pentágono, Proceso 175 People magazine 159 A People’s History of the United States (Zinn) 2 Perales, Rosalina 135, 136, 139 performance: art at intersection of queer and pan-Indigenous identities 14; cha’anil (Mayan concept) for 106–107; as change 18; diverse manifestations of 106; parodic 12–13; as participatory 15; power of based on theater theory 11; to reclaim women’s role in history 14; urban 100 performance art 11, 110 performance partnerships 10–11 performance studies 18 performative pedagogy 7 performative responses 16 pericón nacional (dance) 26 Peruvian Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani 136, 184 Petterson, Robert 155 Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends 145 Phelan, Peggy 191 Phillips, Jordan B. 137 Philoctète, René 123 Piel (street performance, Tzoc Bucup) 100 Pinochet, Augusto 178 Piscator, Erwin 210 playing Creole 21–22; by-products of 25; converting mythical into reality 25; emotional color in 26; as heart and soul of members’ activities 31–34; in public spaces 28; as representative of individual and collective struggle 23–24; spirit taking hold 25–26; transformative power of 25

Podestá, José 24, 25 Podestá-Scotti company 24, 26, 30, 31 Pogue singers 13, 80, 81, 82–87, 88, 90, 96 political cabaret (Mexico City) 7, 8 political interventionist theater 205, 212–213 politics and art as one 13 politics of visibility 190–192 Popovich, Matthew 205 Pound, Ezra 122 pre-Hispanic Maya peoples 104–105 Prieto Stambaugh, Antonio 16, 17, 179, 191 proceso (Argentinian dictatorship, 1976–1983) 4–5 Proceso Pentágono y Taller de Investigación Plástica 16 Progressive Arts Clubs (PACs) 17, 204–205, 207, 216 “Project C–Project Confrontation” (Birmingham, Alabama) 4 protest theater 11 Pueblo-Panama Plan 181 Puerto Rico … ¡fuá! (Ferrari) 137 Putin, Vladimir 1 Q Queer artists 175 queer carnivalesque 62–63 queer embodiment 64–68; as epistemic 65 “Queering Native Literature, Indigenizing Queer Theory” (Justice & Cox) 104 queer performance 60–63 Queerpoéticas 100 queer utopia 186, 194–195 Quirk, Robert E. 156, 157 R Racism 7, 59, 61, 62, 67 racist housing practices (Chicago) 2–3 Radio Televisión Martí 166, 167 A Rain of Words: A Bilingual Anthology of Women’s Poetry in Francophone Africa (D’Almeida) 123 Ralli, Teresa 184 rape as act of power 52 Recovering Lost Footprints (Arias) 101 red mask campaign (Argentina) 41, 52

Index 229 The Reestablishment of Abya Yala (Tzoc Bucup & Arenas Carter) 100–101, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110–111 Reguillo, Rossana 183 Regules, Elías 20, 24, 30, 31 Repertorio (Y No Había Luz) 144 Réquiem para un alcaraván (Avendaño) 176, 178 Restaging the Sixties: Radical Theaters and their Legacies (Harding & Rosenthal) 136 Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC) 13, 79, 82, 89, 92 revolutionary modernists 210 Rifkin, Mark 104 Right Hand, Left Hand (Livesay) 214 Rihanna 68 Rinaldi, Ray Mark 95 Rodríguez, Jesusa 7, 8 Rodríguez, Sergio González 49 Rosenbaum, Brenda 102, 106 Rosenthal, Cindy 136, 138 Rothstein, Richard 3 Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) 17, 203, 205, 206, 216 Rozan, Micheline 136 Rubin, Don 208 Rubio, Miguel 184 Russell, Diana 40 Ryan, Oscar 17, 204, 205, 207, 208, 215 Ryan, Toby 211, 213 Ryan, Toby Gordon 215 S Sábato, Hilda 31 Salcedo, Doris 13, 81, 90–93 same-sex marriage 14 Sánchez, Florencio 25 Sánchez, Gonzalo 81, 83 Sánchez, José A. 191 Sánchez, Luis Rafael 135, 137 San Francisco Mime Troupe 10 Santaliz, Pedro 139 Santa Muerta Cartonera 100 Santisteban, Emilio 17 Santos, Juan Manuel 13, 88, 90 Santos Vega (Gutiérrez) 23, 24 Sassen, Saskia 49 Saxe, Al 210 Schechner, Richard 81, 83, 93, 160, 163 Schneider, Bethany 104 Schumann, Peter 137

Section 98, Criminal Code of Canada 17, 18, 202, 203, 204, 205, 215, 217 Sédar Senghor, Léopold 118 Sedgwick, Eve 185 Segato, Rita 50, 52 segregation, legislated 3 September 11, 2001 attacks 80 September 26, 2016 peace agreement between Colombian government and FARC 79, 81 1791 Vodou ceremony (Demesmin) 15 sexual diversity 99–100 Shibboleth (Salcedo art installation) 92 Shulman, Michael 8, 9 Sigal, Pete 104 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Trouillot) 126 La Silla Vacia 89 Simons, Marlise 166 “Singing the Territory” (Botero & Vergara) 81 slavery 71 Smith, A. E. 204, 205, 207, 214, 215 Smith, Stewart 204 Smith, Timothy 102, 105 Smith, Wayne 161 social media 38, 40–41, 49 Sociedad Criolla 20 Sociedad Criolla Elías Regules 31 somatic techniques 66, 67 Sosa Ramos, Lydia Esther 134, 135 Southern Christian Leadership Conference 4 Spalding and Rogers’s company 22 Spanish Civil War 208 Spatz, Ben 65 Spears, Arthur K. 120 Stalin, Joseph 203 Standard Theatre, Toronto 210 Stanford University 3 Stegner, Wallace 3 Stockton, Kathryn Bond 69 street theater 3 Sutton, Benjamin 170 T Tabares, Vivian Martínez 139, 146 Taino peoples 116 Taller de Histriones 137 Taller de Investigación Plástica 175 Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro 133 Tatonetti, Lisa 104

230

Index

Taylor, Diana 4, 5, 12, 163–164, 171, 175, 177, 185, 192 Teatro Universitario 134 Teatreros Ambulantes de Cayey 137, 138 Teatro Breve 137, 140 Teatro Campesino 10 Teatro de la Opera, Buenos Aires 25 Teatro del Sesenta 135, 137 Teatro Experimental de Cali (Colombia) 136 Teatro Experimental del Ateneo 135 Teatro Fray Mocho (Argentina) 136 Teatro La Candelaria (Colombia) 136 El teatro puertorriqueño (Fiet) 137 Teatro Rodante 134, 135 Teatro Solís, Montevideo 25 Teatro Tapia (San Juan) 135 Textos para teatro de El Tajo del Alacrán (L. M. González) 136 theater collectives 15; activism of 132–133; collective nature of creative process 131–132; international 136–137; in Puerto Rico 131–148 theater marketplace 24 theater memory 133 Theatre Festival, Institute of Puerto Rican Culture 135 theatrical techniques in an expanded field 65–66 A Theory of Parody (Hutcheon) 10 Toronto Star 206, 213–214, 215, 216 Torres, Diana J. 181 Torres, Luis Lloréns 133 Trans-Indigenous methodology 104 transloca gesture 186 troubadours 26, 117 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph 126 Trump, Donald 1, 157 Turner, Victor 81 twice-behaved behavior 83 Two-Spirit beings 104, 175 Tzoc Bucup, Manuel 14, 100, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 114 U Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association 205 Una de cal y una de arena (ASYS) 142 Una mirada interna de un grupo de teatro (Y No Había Luz) 145

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights 82 Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) 167, 169 United Farm Workers (UFW) union 11 United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean 39 University of Kansas 5, 6 University of Mississippi 4 Unwriting Maya Literature (Worley & Palacios) 101 urbanization 20 La utopia de la mariposa (Crespo) 186, 194 V Valdés Figueroa, Eugenio 169 Valdez, Luis 10, 11 Valencia, Sayak 180, 183 Valencia Caizamo, Nelly 83, 84, 88 Van Marissing Méndez, Neeltje 144 Vázquez, Cecilia 52 Vega, Santos 28 Vergara, Aurora 81, 82, 85, 87, 88 Verlaine, Paul 122 Viladrich, Anahí 26 Villagómez Velázquez, Yanga 182 “Un violador en tu camino” (LasTesis) 52 Visibility, politics of 175–196 Visions of Power in Cuba (Guerra) 164 Vodou ceremony (Bois Caïman, Haiti, August 1791) 116–117, 126 Vodou religion 117, 120 La vuelta al hogar (Brau) 133 W Wagner, Richard 122 Weinstein, Oscar 207 Welk, Lawrence 122 “What role does body art play in a country of disappeared bodies?” (Santisteban) 17 Wild West shows 22–23 Will, George 159, 160 Wilson, Eoin 183 Winnipeg general strike (1919) 17, 202 Winnipeg Progressive Arts Club 215 Witt, Emily 9 Womack, Craig 104 Women's Action Coalition 2

Index 231 wongol (Haitian poetic form) 120 The Worker 205, 207, 216 Workers’ Experimental Theatre 204 Workers’ Laboratory Theatre 210 Workers Unity League 205 Worley, Paul M. 100, 101 Y Y No Había Luz 15, 132, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 144–148 Young Communist League (YCL) 205, 207

Yuyachkani (Peru) 136, 184 Z Zapatistas 2 Zapotec peoples 175, 176, 182, 184, 186, 193–194, 195 Zayas, Dean 135 Zéphir, Flore 120 Zinn, Howard 2 Zuken, Joe 215, 216 Zumthor, Paul 110