I Left Whispering Slowly

By Marco Guagnelli

I was born and raised in Mexico City. Like the majority of my generation, I was raised by a single mother. We had a full house: four siblings, two cats, and my mom, who was hardly ever around because she worked double shifts. My siblings and I went to a private school, and my mom spent almost all her money on our tuition. She had heard about this “elite” school on a radio program and decided that the best thing she could do was to invest her money in a quality education for her children. That’s how I ended up in a school for upper-class people.

In elementary school, my classmates would sometimes invite me to their homes. I remember one classmate who had a three-meter waterfall in his living room; another had a sauna and a swimming pool; I remember another had a pet peacock and servants who would serve us snacks in the garden. At the end of the day with my friends, my mom would pick me up in a taxi and we’d go back home. We lived in a two-bedroom apartment, and I usually slept on a couch or shared a bed with my mom and younger brother. As a child, I struggled to accept my social class; I recognized the ambiguity between my interior and exterior worlds. In time, something of the “elite” education shone within me, despite not having access to an affluent material world.

Growing up in Mexico City was an experience full of contradictions. Modernity, as in most global south countries, translated into rapid economic growth, wealth in the hands of a few, social and environmental problems, machismo, greed, drug trafficking, and the breakdown of traditional values. In school, we were taught about “our indigenous cultures” while still participating in colonial binaries; on TV, they promoted the beauty of our land while, in service of a neoliberal economic model, the land is sold, stripped, and destroyed. Our baroque, flavorful, colorful, festive culture was stained by the violence that permeated every aspect of life. There, life and death join hands, the chaotic and the sublime circle one another and dance an eternal symphony.

I migrated to the United States two years ago, adding yet another layer of contradictions. I began to notice not only the disjuncture between my upbringing and my education, but also between my Mexican-ness and the culture of the U.S. This process of displacement and uprooting, this rupture from the norms of territory and class, have helped me question my certainty about who I am, and how I exist in the world. Recognizing my body within the paradigms of my first home opens up a space where I can construct and deconstruct identity narratives in this new home. Through the body, we displace our geographies, language, and memory while we keep moving. The “Mexas” who live in Chicago have renamed the neighborhoods. What used to be Czech and Polish areas are now populated with Virgins of Guadalupe, carnitas stands, and murals of Emiliano Zapata. Bodies inevitably leave a trail in their wake, a testament to their existence, and in so doing, they redefine themselves.

The body (in a Deleuzian sense) is an imaginary concept. As a unified entity, it organizes the world without participating in it. We experience the body through interacting with place and other bodies around it. The challenge in the logic of displacement of memory and geography is how to become a body-as-subject (and thus integrate the corporeal and imaginary). The history that bodies carry aims to signify the construction of our own identity. The foundations on which I built my social and family connections were fragmented by modernity, crossed by historicity and time. And this imaginary body acts in a performative[1] sense, inhabiting time and place surrounded by other bodies. How can I be translated in such a way that I can belong in a context that is not mine?

When I say that modernity has crossed me, I refer to the imperative of modernization, the desire to eradicate the ideological distance between myself and the metropolitan West. Migration came to me as a reaction to inequality. It is my response, and that of many people from Latin America to the process of ideological homogenization inherent in globalization. How does that process manifest in my body? I want to put the landscape inside my body, I want to eat the park benches, absorb the foreign language, suck in the bodies around me, I want to be part of this new place, be part of the strange. Can the contemporary body truly resist not only the impact of current forces but also the consequences of historical forces, and even perhaps facilitate communicative processes that could lead to a new or renewed communal way of thinking?

The answer relates to how communication by bodily means and the relationship of the body with its context, time, and thus its history, should progress. If a previous aesthetic was concerned with deep memory and long tradition, what is the artistic capacity of the (reduced) contemporary body to engage with history? For me, the skin holds the ultimate metaphor of embodiment; it is the mantle that covers our interior, the border of the organs, the enclosure of everything we understand as inside. The skin is not just a physical barrier; it is a site where interactions between the individual and their environment develop, it is a political institution. Ideologies are inscribed there. Clothes and everything we place on our skin are extensions and prosthetics, the second skin that helps us express what we carry inside, our identity, and helps us relate to our environment. By displacing geographies, narratives are also displaced. An epistemic migration from the inside out, from home to the foreign, from skin to clothing.

"You know what? We have to leave here because they’re going to find me and kill me."

"I had to flee my country because I was in the military, and I am a homosexual."

"My dad was involved in drug trafficking. He was killed, and I had to leave."[2]

It is not a sonic evocation, but the subjectivity found behind the farewell or escape. The body is, in a performative way, a vessel of personal narrative and its embodiments. I decided to design a dress, as an exploration of the dynamic interaction between the corporeal and memory, between performativity and embodiment, to consider the profound influence clothing has on shaping our perception of ourselves and others.

A monumental transparent plastic dress covers much of the Representatives' Hall in the Manzana de las Luces in downtown Buenos Aires. My second skin absorbs history and mutters the collapse of modernity and the re-signification of my body. This character with grossly exaggerated features evokes my migration and the migration of those who accompany me, seeking an answer to problems from the community. If my body was educated to signify (man, Mexican, heterosexual, middle class), my response is to be a dissident in my behavior. I repeat again and again with my dress the discourses of what I have to unlearn. Whitin the dress, I illuminate the child inside me, it is a way to honor him within his contradictions. I devoured him; time helped me digest him within my entrails, and I am vomiting him by force of migrating.

This performance has two poetic aspects contained in the dress. The plastic dress works with the idea that a garment can be both place and sculpture. As place, I understood it as a site that absorbs and contains, as if it were a repository of memory: a home. But plastic is suffocating, I cannot live in memory, I cannot breathe. In this performance, to breath is to be seen, it is embodiment of memory, of what is recognized; it brings the surrounding bodies into its retina and its other senses. Another quality is its transparency and opacity, as spectators can distinguish that there is a naked body moving under the dress. Essentially, we are naked bodies wandering within clothes that interact with each other, those physical and ideological borders we cross daily to communicate, like the borders we have to cross to migrate.

"A friend paid for our trip to Tijuana. As soon as I arrived with my daughters, we never heard from her again, and we had to sleep on the street. Someone offered us help, and we went with him. And then, what I was fleeing from in Honduras happened to me again here."

Within the dress, audio testimonies of people in mobility contexts I worked with in Tijuana are played aloud. We came from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, and Venezuela, and we talked about the reasons we migrated and their consequences. Migration is a technology that stems from a modernization of colonial processes, centered on the exploitation of mestizo and impoverished indigenous groups. It is an operational tool of neocolonial politics, exploiting racialized individuals who are socially classified as poor, as peasants, informal workers, queer people, women, and children. When their voices are heard beneath the dress, I remember the causes of our migration; people come to claim what is theirs, what was taken from them, it is a fight for dignity and rebellion against oppression. This performance is a tribute to all the people who move while carrying memory on their backs, in an effort to preserve it and give it dignity.

[1] I think performativity in the terms mentioned by Judith Butler, argues that gender (like any other form of identity) is not based on pre-existing categories (such as biological or ontological ones) but is formed through the continuous repetition of discursive acts developed within a social and cultural context.

[2] These phrases were collected in an art workshop as part of the staging of Shakespeare's *The Tempest*, a play performed with people in a context of mobility in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico (2022).