You are presenting two pieces at FTA this year. How do they fit into your artistic journey?

Requiem and Bardaje come from very different time periods. Réquiem para un alcaraván opened in 2011. It’s one of the oldest pieces in my repertoire; time and lived experience have certainly shaped the way I approach the performance. In Réquiem, the actions and dances are closely related to traditions that are still active in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. However, it set in a muxe cultural ecosystem, where the aesthetic is intrinsically feminine, syncretic, and local.

The syncretism at work in the piece comes mainly from the West: the use of the big skirt, colours, motifs, music, celebration… which is offset by the presence of my Mesoamerican body, which restores the balance—or intensifies the conflict, depending on which side the viewer takes.

Bardaje was created in 2022 as an act of defiance, an act of radical imagination: "bardaje" refers to mixing things together. I try to connect 500 years of ethnographic documentation as if there were no territorial divisions, just a single long tunnel stretching back: a vast, continuous cultural corridor that is timeless, atemporal, and aspatial.

This radical act of imagination connects you to the past while opening up future possibilities. Is that what you call the “archaeology of memory”?

I believe that Bardaje is a medium that embodies the “archaeology of memory”. Unlike in traditional archaeology, objects are not merely artifacts; they are conveyors of memory and, by extension, of emotions.

In Mexico, theatre and dance have a consented approach to stage performance. Indigenous peoples, who “lack records” of their own forms of artistic expression according to conventional and institutional perspectives, are reduced to being viewed through the forms they adopted and that were transmitted by missionaries and colonizers. “Traditional dances” are a good example of this.

I try to move away from this legacy and imagine how to reconstruct a torn fabric, a broken jar, or a partially burned canvas based on the archaeology of memory. How can we recreate these? How can we animate them? I think that’s the most daring element of Bardaje.

Where do the objects and elements that accompany you in Bardaje come from?

Things started to take shape through my experiences and desires, like a puzzle that is put together and transformed over time. The silver tongue that I wear in Bardaje was given to me in 2008 by my father, who found it. I kept it without really knowing what it could be used for, and it became a key element of the piece when it was created in 2022. Around the same time, through a collaboration with the community of San Miguel Tzinacapan in Puebla state, I acquired the copili headdress that also accompanies me during the performance. Traditional dancers wear it upright on their heads symbolizing the Sun in the Dance of the Quetzals. In my reflection on “the archaeology of memory,” I associate it to Mixtec mythology, which tells of an angry warrior who shoots arrows at the sun until it bleeds to death and falls, wounded, at sunset.

In Réquiem para un alcaraván, you perform rituals that are reserved for women and denied to muxes. Why do you associate them with a bird in this work?

The alcaraván (Burhinus oedicnemus) is called berelele in Zapotec: “bere” indicates the family of birds and “lele” refers to the sound it makes (onomatopoeia). According to oral tradition, it is believed that the female sometimes kills the male after mating, or if the male is domesticated alone, he will die of sadness. In Tehuantepec, we have a dance in which a couple acts out the mating and death of the male. In Requiem this is a solo dance, a metaphor for the muxes who die alone, without a partner, as was the case of my muxe teacher who taught me to dance. Réquiem para un alcaraván has the subtitle “a ritual of atonement for the faggots of the world”.

The Catholic religion imposed heteronormative monogamy as the only model for relationships. The flowers shedding their petals in Réquiem allude to this reality, referencing the Zapotec tradition of the balana, which translates as "virginity." In the traditional customs of the Zapotec people of the Isthmus, the man kidnaps his betrothed, whose virginity is then verified. The groom’s family publicly celebrates this by handing out flowers, confetti, or red wine. I also set straight the false notion spread by journalists and academics that “muxes sexually initiate heterosexual men and that this is the only reason for their existence”. In my experience, the muxes are the ones who are initiated by heterosexual men.

Réquiem is heavily symbolic. How do you deal with the elements inherited from Catholicism?

What makes Réquiem seem so transgressive, even in the Mexican context, is that the religious elements are embodied by someone who is the living personification of “sin” according to the Catholic Church or any other Protestant Christian denomination. The muxe is the living embodiment of sin par excellence.

How did you end up studying anthropology and pursuing an artistic career?

I grew up in a place where it was not unusual to find containers filled with bones, obsidian and jade beads, and snail fossils. I played with these objects, which are considered relics of an ancient culture. I have always seen them as something that needed to be preserved. Archaeology led me to anthropology, and social anthropology made me aware of my identity as an Indigenous person and a descendant of the First Nations of this continent, as well as the importance of my grandmother and great-grandmother in shaping my memory and subjective understanding.

When I was growing up, aesthetic experiences were part of daily life. For example, setting up the ancestral altar is an aesthetic act. You play with symmetry, proportions, colour, and harmony. You remember each element’s place in the cosmos. I’ve always danced as well, and I was immersed in the theatricality of the Catholic Church. The saints wear costumes, and so does the priest. A codified ritual is performed, and during Holy Week, children don wings and watch as Christ is taken down from the cross. And while I was at Art School, I discovered that I could make a career out of everything that affected me as a child. I didn’t decide to become an artist; I simply recode what affected me as a child—and affects the lives of so many other children. Through this recoding, I try to help our subjectivities and our memories to encompass colors when we’re shown only monochrome, joy when there's only guilt in sight, and freedom when the path reserved for people like me is inhabited only by penance, repentance, restraint, sacrifice, and pain.

Muxes do not conform to the stereotypical roles expected of men. Why are they sometimes referred to as a “third gender” even though they are closer to feminine stereotypes?

The “third gender” label comes from outside; it names the other person. If you ask me why, I would say it's due to ignorance or epistemological “supremacy”. Sometimes people speak of a third sex, which is even worse. To borrow from Baudrillard, who talks about the artifice of artifice, I would say that the sociocultural construction of historical and temporal femininity is an artifice created around a body. So when a community situated outside heterosexual norms—what we now call queer—replicates this artifice in its own way, it reproduces an artifice of an artifice in other ways; we are a simulation of a simulation. Perhaps this is what bothers the hegemony: knowing it has been exposed, knowing its trick has been laid bare and its “panacea” stripped away. They have never had the power to multiply bread or turn water into wine; those who do are the working women. We no longer believe that they are the sole possessors of the one and only universal truth, nor do we still believe in their “In God We Trust”.

Asking whether “muxe” is a masculine or feminine word is also a question that places us within a binary framework—what I call “the origin fallacy”.

Interview by Fabienne Cabado

Back to the show Réquiem para un alcaraván

Back to the show Bardaje

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