Keeping it Together:
“The Body of Remembrance” and the Re-enactment of the Migrant Experience
Karina Hodoyan University of San Francisco

A cold winter's night at Buenos Aires' Centro Recoleta was the setting for the multi-media performance piece by Secos y Mojados. The collective from the San Francisco Bay Area composed of artist-migrants themselves, is part of recent performances dealing with migration and diaspora in the Americas that try to break with society’s stereotypical or martyrized constructions of the migrant solely as a source of production and cheap labor. As the waves for demand and exclusion of cheap labor continue to “swell the borders with ecology of human waste, of humans as waste,” Secos’ multilayered narrative includes those same discourses by contextualizing them within a broader experience of the disenfranchised. This is achieved by mapping the physical and mental travails of the diaspora unto the performer's body, the audience, and the outdoor space. Here, the performer Violeta Luna represents the movement across the continent, the body that works, suffers war and violence, erasure, and division. But crucially, also the body that remembers and unifies what has been dispersed through the diaspora. Here the re-enactment of the different actions and discourses that constitute the migrant-self transform it into a redemptive act of remembrance and unification.

The piece begins with a disembodied voice of Roque Dalton’s “Poema de amor” calling forth the nameless dead, the forgotten, the criminalized, and “los eternos indocumentados.” In other words, those who have been erased by transnational migration/diaspora and demand for cheap labor throughout Latin America’s history. The voice is accompanied by ghostly and fragmented images by visual artist Victor Cartagena projected across the various walls—pieces that will later unify in the body of the migrant. The real time images filmed by Director Roberto Varea work as a third narrative that mediates the experience of the present. The unearthing of memories is referenced through a child's game of hopscotch interlaced with footage of people running across the border and other points of entry such as Ellis Island. Here, the game parallels the different obstacles that need to be "jumped"—from point a to b to c— over a forensic grid that further alludes to the erasure of the “disappeared” in Latin America. The use of games and child-like gestures throughout the piece underscores how the recollection of the past is always informed by the present, specifically through bodily gestures and movements. The layering of actions, images, and objects linked to a broader memory of migration seeks to integrate physical memory with past events and present struggles.

The projected images on the walls materialize in the apparition of a worker with a shovel at center stage. The performer’s gestures and movements are accompanied by the testimony of a migrant from war-torn El Salvador. The shovel becomes loaded with meaning as a symbol of hard physical labor and as a tool to unearth a ball of rope. The rope is used to divide the audience into different groups to mirror the exclusion and separation of populations across the American continent. This action is literally an unearthing of the contradictions between economic and political struggles in the home country, transnational demand for cheap labor and the increasing barriers and exclusions the migrant population suffers in their quest for a living wage. Macabre, child-like gestures and games stand in sharp contrast to the violent actions and struggles of the migrant experience, like playfully cutting ones self as a symbol of the physical and psychological pressures to transform into working bodies, together with the aggressive sharpening of those scissors on the shovel. Furthermore, the performer extends those games to the mapping of the territory—two women are tied frozen in a game of patty cakes, groups of audience members are unwillingly involved in a tying up of Cowboys and Indians, a "them and us" division of labor in global capitalism.

The re-enactment of the mental and physical travails of migrants connects actions and individual memories to a broader history of migration to the United States. Repeated actions such as migrants crossing the Rio Bravo/Grande with their belongings on their head and their shoes in their hands becomes contextualized within the discourse of the US government that admits to needing migrants “for work that others won’t do” while also making them visible only as criminals or laborers. The performer’s body is transformed by the violent movements of being tied and tortured upon arrival. Furthermore, placed in parallel to the divisive actions over the land, the body is also crossed out and divided and her arms blanked out for labor. The emergence of the migrant subject is further emphasized by the audience that marks it with labels such as criminal. The body becomes a mirror of the divided territory where the migrant is either a tool for production or placed as an outcast and criminal. At center stage, Luna takes those divisions and cuts through them in order to arrive at the final transformation and integration of the migrant-self.

The last transformation begins with the performer jumping across divided lines, where the macabre game of  hopscotch the shovel reappears to turn the narrative full circle from the beginning of the journey. The meaning of the shovel is now also transformed by adding another layer to the action of unearthing of memory, this time from the fruit of one’s labor, bread. The weaving together of individual objects that represent one’s sense of identity (photos of family, religious relics, citizenship represented in a Mexican passport) are accompanied by the dispersed images projected upon the white sheathed body of remembrance. At the end, the layering of actions and discourse consolidates in the ghostly body of the performer calling forth those who have been erased from history and untying the spatial divisions that keep us literally captive and divided as an audience and as a continent. This multi-layered narrative offers redemption and a retrieved sense of identity through remembrance and the re-enactment and integration of the migrant’s physical and psychic journey.

Karina Hodoyan is a PhD candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department at Stanford University. She currently teaches in the Modern and Classical Languages and Performing Arts and Social Justice Programs at the University of San Francisco in California. Her specialization is 19th and 20th century Mexican and Border Literary and Cultural Studies, with an interest in urban and feminist studies. Her most recent publication on the history of Latin@ Performance art in California was published in a Performance anthology in Mexico City.