
The artists Elyla and Purificación exchange dreams and critical notions regarding mestizo identities subjected to the colonial apparatus in Nicaragua and Guatemala, which, in tension with their mariconería, outline artistic practices that make imagining other worlds possible.
Through what paradigms is an identity instilled in us? Knowing Elyla's work, I suspect that the gender binary has had more implications for our identity assumptions than I could have imagined. In mid-August, with our memory wounded, as Elyla says, we began to meet in this sort of virtual non-space to talk about memory, political concerns, and the intuition that we are seemingly fucking doomed to remain screaming from these territories in the face of the quest for justice. Elyla has embarked on a process of recognition of what they have called "routes for interrupting the hegemonic cultural narratives" of their territory (the Pacific region of Nicaragua). They question and reassemble the imaginary around their own mestizaje[1] to highlight how the colonial apparatus has eliminated any possibility of self-encounter with an ancestrality. Their artistic practice is a “fluidity stop" where the reinterpretation of symbols and languages seeks a new space of existence; a place which nestles them together better. Barro Mestiza, their first solo exhibition (Carazo, Nicaragua 2021) is the result of an exploration that, according to their terms, dismantles the colonial apparatus characterized by the gender binary.
We began to imagine an allegorical route: licking each other, body to body; examining our forms and possibilities, dancing with them and reviewing the common memories running through us like the perceptions and flavors that the tongue recognizes.Here in Guatemala, on this side of the wound, the collective Organización de Locas[2] Centroamericanas y del Caribe (ODELCA) [Organization of Central American and Caribbean Queens] shares the urgency for a confrontational semiotics where jokes, fiction, and parody become a formula for corroding the propaganda and hegemonic narratives of the postwar period. Naming ourselves in dissidence far from martyrology, we are loosening our tongues! Elyla (E): I would like to begin by asking questions, because that is how I started this journey: How to translate mestizaje? What does it mean to be mestizx? I ask myself first and then everyone else: In what ways is mestizaje lived in Mesoamerica? This simple exercise of translating the term mestizaje aims to reflect on the bodily-political affectations implied in assuming a mechanism of colonial and racial identity in our territories. Let’s really make this a bodily exercise, a stopping and asking ourselves:
Can I feel mestizaje in my body? Is there even a sensation?Have I given myself the time and space to identify it? Does my tongue move when I pronounce mestizaje? How do I pronounce it with a loose tongue? What is its color? Are he, she, them, they mestizajes? What memories does my mestizaje carry? What stories exist in our respective family lineages when we begin to name ourselves mestizxs? Is naming oneself mestizx the same as naming oneself white-mestizx? What privileges or access do I have as a mestizx? What political implications for the land itself and the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica do these names have? Can I recognize mestizaje as a colonialist apparatus erasing Indigenous history, knowledge, and ancestry from our bodies? And if so, what new identity can I give birth to and what are the access points to my ancestry? And finally, could this dissident sexuality be my greatest anti-colonial tool in relation to mestizaje?
How do we situate the non-binary as a sensitive trans experience born from an honest corporeality which rests in our intimate/personal/historical memory? Is it even possible?What does it imply to mutate the non-binary/fluid/queer into an anti-colonial space of political agency for our ancestralities? How can the non-binary be articulated with the trans-binary and feminized transvestites struggle through a relationship that isn’t flattening or opportunistic towards the spaces already conquered by them? (P): To get closer to possible answers, we should be well-licked to arm ourselves against the common enemy: licking amongst ourselves so as not to lick ideas responding to other regions, especially the north. Out there, the system continues to tie us up in bundles as if they were not afraid of us. We are huecas, our fear has been transformed into enjoyment and pleasure. (E): In Mesoamerica the invitation is to lick ourselves in order to begin to learn about our own cochona, hueca stories, and those of all dissident corporealities.
We must begin to savor ourselves, to turn into cannibalistic tongues, to escape from language and melt into pleasure.(P): The road is already made; it has begun to open for the huequitudes for a long time. All that’s left is for us to arm ourselves with tinsel and put on our highest heels to imagine futures in which the chest facing the sky is a greeting more queer than combative. Futures where we honor the lineages preceding us that whisper their existence to us. From our chests, those ancestralities will sing and invoke other dissidents in the uproar. Our tongues will be with them and with those who come to lick us. The tongue will also be the best instrument, the best practice of recognition in the face of a world that sees the butterfly house as a mass without nuance: licking to know that we are gathered together, where the flavors are recognition of different forms and terms, from which other locas are gathered in this drift called "history." Prepare your feelings, once we have learned to swim through the slime of so many strident locas, in this sea we will weave ourselves like a mesh embroidered in cross-stitch to keep us all afloat.
The artists Elyla and Purificación exchange dreams and critical notions regarding mestizo identities subjected to the colonial apparatus in Nicaragua and Guatemala, which, in tension with their mariconería, outline artistic practices that make imagining other worlds possible.
We began to imagine an allegorical route: licking each other, body to body; examining our forms and possibilities, dancing with them and reviewing the common memories running through us like the perceptions and flavors that the tongue recognizes.Here in Guatemala, on this side of the wound, the collective Organización de Locas[2] Centroamericanas y del Caribe (ODELCA) [Organization of Central American and Caribbean Queens] shares the urgency for a confrontational semiotics where jokes, fiction, and parody become a formula for corroding the propaganda and hegemonic narratives of the postwar period. Naming ourselves in dissidence far from martyrology, we are loosening our tongues! Elyla (E): I would like to begin by asking questions, because that is how I started this journey: How to translate mestizaje? What does it mean to be mestizx? I ask myself first and then everyone else: In what ways is mestizaje lived in Mesoamerica? This simple exercise of translating the term mestizaje aims to reflect on the bodily-political affectations implied in assuming a mechanism of colonial and racial identity in our territories. Let’s really make this a bodily exercise, a stopping and asking ourselves:
Can I feel mestizaje in my body? Is there even a sensation?Have I given myself the time and space to identify it? Does my tongue move when I pronounce mestizaje? How do I pronounce it with a loose tongue? What is its color? Are he, she, them, they mestizajes? What memories does my mestizaje carry? What stories exist in our respective family lineages when we begin to name ourselves mestizxs? Is naming oneself mestizx the same as naming oneself white-mestizx? What privileges or access do I have as a mestizx? What political implications for the land itself and the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica do these names have? Can I recognize mestizaje as a colonialist apparatus erasing Indigenous history, knowledge, and ancestry from our bodies? And if so, what new identity can I give birth to and what are the access points to my ancestry? And finally, could this dissident sexuality be my greatest anti-colonial tool in relation to mestizaje?
How do we situate the non-binary as a sensitive trans experience born from an honest corporeality which rests in our intimate/personal/historical memory? Is it even possible?What does it imply to mutate the non-binary/fluid/queer into an anti-colonial space of political agency for our ancestralities? How can the non-binary be articulated with the trans-binary and feminized transvestites struggle through a relationship that isn’t flattening or opportunistic towards the spaces already conquered by them? (P): To get closer to possible answers, we should be well-licked to arm ourselves against the common enemy: licking amongst ourselves so as not to lick ideas responding to other regions, especially the north. Out there, the system continues to tie us up in bundles as if they were not afraid of us. We are huecas, our fear has been transformed into enjoyment and pleasure. (E): In Mesoamerica the invitation is to lick ourselves in order to begin to learn about our own cochona, hueca stories, and those of all dissident corporealities.
We must begin to savor ourselves, to turn into cannibalistic tongues, to escape from language and melt into pleasure.(P): The road is already made; it has begun to open for the huequitudes for a long time. All that’s left is for us to arm ourselves with tinsel and put on our highest heels to imagine futures in which the chest facing the sky is a greeting more queer than combative. Futures where we honor the lineages preceding us that whisper their existence to us. From our chests, those ancestralities will sing and invoke other dissidents in the uproar. Our tongues will be with them and with those who come to lick us. The tongue will also be the best instrument, the best practice of recognition in the face of a world that sees the butterfly house as a mass without nuance: licking to know that we are gathered together, where the flavors are recognition of different forms and terms, from which other locas are gathered in this drift called "history." Prepare your feelings, once we have learned to swim through the slime of so many strident locas, in this sea we will weave ourselves like a mesh embroidered in cross-stitch to keep us all afloat.
Pie de foto para Imagen 2
Pie de foto para Imagen 2