“By the nineteenth century, the very memory of the connection between the agricultural laborer and communal property had, of course, vanished.”
Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1
In this stark statement, Marx announces game over for the commons. After four hundred years of land enclosures and privatization, the European working class had lost not only physical access to common lands, but also the “very memory” of the commons as a basic right and co-existential truth. He thus draws a distinction between the commons as a physical site and the sensibility associated with its collective use—call it commons-sense. To lose the physical commons is to incite struggle—as occurred across centuries of peasant revolt in Europe. But to lose commons-sense, Marx implies, is to eclipse from the imagination the very possibility of a collective way of organizing our lives.
This article is about a work of contemporary Mexican dance theater called Danzantes del Alba (Dancers of the Dawn). But more fundamentally it is about the edge and whisper of another value system that keeps the commons in the terrain of common sense, looping people and practices together in a kind of communitarian weave. This essay is a reflection on Danzantes del Alba—how it began and what I observed when I had the privilege of attending rehearsals for a production in New York City in 2023. The piece is complex because of the number of phenomena it touches—immigration, textile, labor, and Mesoamerican festive dance. But it is unified (or, as one dancer puts it, it “has a latent energy that keeps it centered” (Figure 7)) because all these phenomena are spiraling around a common commitment. By weaving disparate communitarian efforts together, Danzantes del Alba invites us to notice the particular ways in which textile and dance hold value—how struggles over competing value systems, competing ways of measuring value, are stitched into their respective fibers. Thus, at the same time that this article focuses on the process of creating Danzantes del Alba, it also gestures to larger implications regarding repressed histories of Mesoamerican dance.
It began in 2016 in the Mexican border town of Tenosique, close to the Guatemalan state of Petén, when theater company Teatro Linea de Sombra (TLS) was invited by the directors of a migrant shelter to help them organize a comparsa—or troupe—to participate in the city’s carnival, a major annual undertaking in the town. TLS began its relationship with Casa Refugio La 72 (House of Refuge the 72) while working on a previous work of theater about immigration.Footnote 1 Out of the scraps of unwanted garments, a visual artist fashioned two costumes (trajes) in the style of El Loco de la Danza, a kind of trickster character typical of certain Mexican festive dances and religious processions. The team at Casa Refugio La 72 rummaged the shelter’s storage closets to make more costumes, collecting items that hung unused: a bridal dress, a tuxedo. And then, under the noses of the local officials who were perched in their elevated seats overseeing the carnival, a group of Central American (im)migrants staying at the shelter found momentary, yet powerful relief from the criminalization that Central Americans typically experience on the northward journey (Vogt Reference Vogt2013). As collaborating anthropologist Rodrigo Parrini wrote, “the migrants parade in front of a community that rejects them and tracks them protected by their masks and carnival trajes. In costume, the migrants jump, shake, and spin scraps of fabric before the gaze of local authorities.”Footnote 2
For TLS, the carnival in Tenosique was a “detonating agent,” an initial spark that spurred a process of research and creation that would eventually manifest as the staged production, Danzantes del Alba (Dancers of the Dawn). In the dancers’ spin, questions detonated about what dance has been and might become, what textile has been and might become, and about resistance to the commodification of (im)migrant lives. As if to unravel that knot, as if to get closer to its core, TLS began adding nodes, weaving relations and timescales into the initial performance, setting up ethnographic projects and artistic laboratories with dancers, musicians, scenic designers, and more. Thirty-six trajes in the same Loco de la Danza style were eventually produced, each one containing thousands of individual scraps cut from other garments and each weighing around fifteen pounds (Figure 1 and 6). The majority of the trajes were created by Cooperativa de Mujeres de Topilejo, a group of women who had restored an abandoned slaughterhouse and turned it into a textile workshop that offered services to the community, including a daycare center, a food pantry, and a space for political organizing. TLS also commissioned trajes from Club Amazonas Gay, a collective of queer textile workers who had become unexpected leaders of their community, and a Honduran woman on an interminable journey North to whom TLS co-director Alicia Laguna gifted a sewing machine so she could support herself on route.
Figure 1. Dancers in the NY production wearing their trajes and crossing Washington Square Park. New York, December 2023.
Thus, at the same rate that the scraps of unwanted garments were being fabricated into outfits for an eventual dance performance, the efforts of particular workers’ collectives were also being woven into something like a social movement, but a social movement in the sense that a work of theater temporarily holds together a community of hope that what they make possible will outlast the event. Indeed, TLS co-director Jorge Vargas remarks that part of the company’s method is to “lose/waste time” (perder tiempo), and to invest time in processes that will never appear in the mise-en-scene (Reference Vargas2023). These are processes that no funding agency will ever calculate, no ticket sale will ever consume, and no audience member will ever cognize—and yet all of which, in Vargas’ terms, densificar los trajes (make the trajes dense). The trajes are dense because they braid relations between the wearers of the original garments, the workers who stitch together the scraps, those same workers’ attempts to reorganize the industry under communitarian terms, and the labor of the dancers who wear the trajes, and in doing so, reactivate memories of the commons that reside in the tissue of Mesoamerican “folkloric” dance. In the rest of this introduction, I explain how we might conceive the density of these relations as a communitarian weave, one that resists commodification at the same time that it challenges dominant narratives about immigration.
In some ways, textiles represent the primordial commodity, or at least a primary reference of commodity critique. At the time that Marx theorized the commodity as a hidden engine of exploitation, he was living in England, which, as cultural theorist Peter Stallybrass explains, was “the heartland of capitalism because it was the heartland of the textile industries.” Its wealth “had been founded first on wool and then on cotton” (Reference Stallybrass and Spyer1998, 190). In the Mesoamerican context in which Danzantes del Alba was created, there is a very rich history of weaving practices that are particular to certain regions, towns, and individual family lines. Woven patterns follow a geometric system of communication that carries forward preconquest mathematical knowledge, artistic innovation, and local history.Footnote 3 And on the other hand, with the introduction of export-processing zones and globalized fast fashion, the Mexican textile and garment sectors have become a notorious hub of maquila labor, where an ideology of female workers’ disposability has contributed to the escalation of femicide in the region.Footnote 4 Although the hyper-exploitation and direct assault on women’s bodies within today’s textile and garment industries may appear unprecedented, such phenomena actually follow a recurring pattern in the history of capitalist accumulation, as labor historian Beth English explains:
Historically, the textile and garment industries are the first established in developing economies because capitalization requirements and start-up costs are relatively low, and production does not require a highly skilled workforce. The industrialization of developing economies, specifically those transitioning away from agriculture, creates an inexpensive surplus pool of young and female laborers, many of whom are initially employed in the textile and apparel industries (Reference English2013, my italics).
These industries, in other words, tend to develop at the cutting edge of primitive accumulation, i.e., the recurring phase of capitalist expansion where the displacement of subsistence farmers opens up land for expropriation while rendering new groups of people dependent upon wage labor. During Europe’s transition to capitalism, this process was initiated by the enclosure of the commons, and in contemporary Mesoamerica, it occurs through the incursion of agribusiness, hydroelectric, and mining projects, and regional trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, all of which have displaced small farmers at massive scales. Before there was an inexpensive surplus pool of young and female laborers, then, there was a social and ecological fabric. The tearing of that fabric is what we hold in our hands when we hold the physical fabric of our clothing. And most people don’t know it. But some people do. And for those people—call them (im)migrants, call them an inexpensive surplus pool of young and female laborers—commodity production and community destruction are inextricably bound. When people from Mesoamerica are divorced from the means of their own subsistence, when they must travel long distances to produce commodities for the global market (including the ultimate commodity of their own cheap(ened) labor), when their bodies are commodified by criminal networks and privatized immigration enforcement regimes on the journey north, when they must physically separate from their families in order to pay for their basic needs, then these (im)migrants experience life as a war on subsistence, a war against their communities.Footnote 5 The feminization of the textile industry, then, is not just about the preponderance of women workers in this sector, but more profoundly about the entire domain of that which is sacrificed so that the commodity can come, again and again, into being.
Considering all of this, we think back to Cooperativa de Mujeres de Topilejo and the other worker-led organizations with whom TLS chose to collaborate in manufacturing trajes for Danzantes del Alba. Each of these producers, in different ways, is waging a war on the war on subsistence: in other words, they are figuring out ways to make their work serve their lives, and not the other way around, how to build spaces of production that keep communities together rather than tearing them apart. Ultimately, then, what is being woven together is not just individual scraps of fabric and individual groups of workers but something I would like to call, following Mexican political theorist Raquel Gutiérrez and Bolivian economist Huáscar Salazar, a communitarian weave, bearing the simultaneous connotation of a noun and a verb, an entity and a process. Gutierrez and Salazar use this term in reference to communities (inchoate and well-established, living on ancestral lands or displaced from them, rural and urban, and in all parts of the planet) who are working to maintain or regain autonomy over the reproduction of their own lives. Much like the worker-led textile workshops that produced the trajes for Danzantes del Alba, the communitarian weave is not just about weaving community members back together—although it is certainly about this too—but also restoring the values and practices of the commons. Under capitalism, reproduction (of individual lives, ecosystems, communities, cultures) tends to be subordinated to, and remade in service of, production (activities producing monetary value).Footnote 6 But in communal forms organized around production-for-use, this hierarchy is reversed; production works in service of reproduction, or the very distinction between the two domains ceases to make sense. Thus, although not all communitarian weaves are tied to the political structures of the agrarian commons, and not all are divorced from the market, they all, nevertheless, from within whatever conditions the participants find themselves, work to restore the idea that the sustained well-being of the (human and more-than-human) community as a whole represents the supreme, self-evident objective of labor.
Gutiérrez and Salazar do not have actual fabric in mind when they use the term “weave” to describe such communities. They use this term, however, because a weave shows us the multiplier effect of connections that knot back over upon themselves and in so doing make the entire fabric stronger. As against the decimation of so many “migrant-sending” communities, the communitarian weave pursues the density of relation as the durable substrate of commons-sense. In a related way, Vargas’ statements about purposefully wasting time guide us to think about Danzantes del Alba less as a discrete event and more as an ongoing communitarian weave whose pace and spread are independent of the flash-and-decay temporality of staged performance, and against which, the staged performance is almost (but not quite) an excuse to forge.
Aware of my interest in this topic, the TLS team allowed me to sit in on the rehearsals for the New York performance, which was produced by the Hemispheric Institute in collaboration with NYU Skirball in December, 2023. After Vargas explained the premise of the piece, one of the dancers, Angel Sigala, said, “I love the idea of telling the story of migration in a way that is not so direct.” The “direct” version, of course, might have reiterated typical tropes that circulate in U.S. culture: the “nation of immigrants” narrative, for instance, or the “good/bad immigrant binary.”Footnote 7 The “indirect” version, on the other hand, is less about immigration as identity and more about immigration as insight. For the New York production of Danzantes del Alba, a call was put out for dancers who had experience in any style or styles, not necessarily familiarity with the Mesoamerican “traditional,” “urban,” and “folkloric” styles represented in the piece.Footnote 8 And similarly, the fact of being an immigrant was presented as an equally essential qualification. But again, this prerequisite was off the presumed content; the dancers could be immigrants from any part of the world, not necessarily Central American or Mexican (and indeed, the New York cast of dancers were of Peruvian, Guinean, Malaysian, Korean, Chinese, Lebanese, and Puerto Rican descent). The “not so direct” approach to representing immigration that this temporary assembly of dancers undertook has to do, precisely, with the vantage point many immigrants possess relative to the commodity form--that is, a lived understanding of its true cost. In that sense, the prerequisite for performers to be immigrants (from anywhere) plus dancers (of any style) is a conduit to a diverse and yet shared understanding about what we are dancing from and what we are dancing for (Figures 2, 5, 7, 8, and 9). This understanding of the “immigrant experience,” quite distinct from the liberal, “nation of immigrants” variant, is generic not because it flattens histories but rather because it suggests a kind of priming, a kind of readiness to perceive the history of struggle that is embedded in the trajes themselves, in their fibers.
Figure 2. Dancer Miranda Zhen-Yao.
This article is accompanied by polaroids taken by photojournalist and activist Cinthya Santos-Briones, whose practice documents the efforts of Mesoamerican communities to process the trauma of immigration policy, organize networks of mutual aid, and preserve and extend Indigenous knowledge within diasporic conditions.Footnote 9 During the rehearsals, Santos-Briones took polaroid photographs of the dancers, attached them to sheets of notebook paper, and then asked the dancers to write short reflections about what participating in Danzantes meant to them. On one hand, these artifacts are indexes of the rehearsal as a compressed, heightened time in which people worked to bring something new into being. And on the other hand, the dancers, all of whom have migration histories of their own, felt that this piece connected them to memories of family, community, and networks of care tracing distinct latitudes across the planet.
In the following section, I trace some of the ways in which Mesoamerican dance practices carry histories of struggle to preserve the commons. In the subsequent section, I zoom in on the rehearsals for the New York production of Danzantes del Alba to consider how the choreography engages these histories without naming them, actualizing them in the very fiber of the practice. And in the final section, I focus on the perspective of the dancers themselves. With Santos-Briones’ polaroids, I highlight one dancer’s experience as a particular fold in a steadily expanding communitarian weave, as if the staged performance were a hand, which, in gathering a textile, creates an infinity of spirals, whorls.
The Communitarian Weave of Mesoamerican Dance
Cuando la danza es el archivo, no queda más que danzarla para actualizarla,
cuando los trajes son documento, sabes que danza y traje arrastran espacios
de vinculación que involucran todas las proxémias existentes. La cadena
de información se vuelve infinita, solo sientes resonar, en los cuerpos, su cauda.
Zuadd Atala Reference Atala2020
[When the dance is the archive, one only needs to dance it in order to actualize it.
When the trajes are documents, you know that dance and traje drag spaces of
relation that involve all existing proxemics. The chain of information
becomes infinite, you only feel resonating, in the bodies, its cauda (lingering impact, like the train of a dress or the tail of a comet).]
In order to create the dance material for Danzantes del Alba, choreographer Zuadd Atala brought together a group of dancers with knowledge of a varied set of folkloric and urban forms. They taught each other movements and developed a practice of repeating sequences until the dancers entered into a kind of trance. A sound designer created an original score that references the driving pulse of maquila labor. In one image of the performance, the dancers throw the trajes into the air and insert their arms into its legs so that the garments hang upside-down in front of their bodies. While rhythmically sending breath through the trajes and into the ground, the dancers gradually lay the trajes down, but the impression is less of removing a garment than of creatures emerging from within the outer layer of their own skin. Arrayed in lumps on the ground after the dancers have walked away, the trajes, slightly inflated, slightly sunken, are supposed to resemble a capullo: the still-inhabited quality of a cocoon after the butterfly has flown.
Atala speaks of Mesoamerican dance as a resonating cauda, evoking the train of a dress or the tail of a comet, as if some invisible yet powerful force trailed behind the movement. Perhaps the infinite chain of information to which Atala alludes refers to the communitarian value systems that Mesoamerican festive dance practices sustain without announcing, advance without prescribing. To appreciate the historical depth of that cauda, it is helpful to remember that, in Europe, the long and violent processes of primitive accumulation that incited the development of capitalism included an attack upon dance. The 15th-19th century European project of enclosing common lands, which set a global pattern of capitalist accumulation in motion, was “amplified by a process of social enclosure,” as Silvia Federici explains, which included “an attack…against all forms of collective sociality and sexuality including sports, games, dances, ale-wakes, festivals, and other group-rituals that had been a source of bonding and solidarity among workers” (Reference Federici2014, 97). The kinds of group rituals that Federici describes are not only about bonding per se, but rather bonding in the context of subsistence and the myriad human and nonhuman relations that must be nurtured in order for a subsistence-based community to thrive. The “Rogationtide perambulation,” for instance, was a “yearly procession among the fields meant to bless the future crops, that was prevented by the hedging of the fields” (Reference Federici2014, 123). Although not (necessarily) a dance, the Rogationtide perambulation is nevertheless an embodied practice in which collective movement is offered to the particular plant species upon which the people depend. The loss of rituals such as these suggests that the enclosure of the commons—so significant for the history of capitalist modernity—might also, from the perspective of dance history, raise a series of questions about the repressed ontologies of dance. When you live off the land upon which you dance, and when you dance upon that land to stimulate its capacity to sustain life—what is dance? How would we rethink the political and energetic effusiveness of dance—what Randy Martin so helpfully refers to as “abundance”—if we were to situate dance history in the context of the agrarian commons, where the experience of abundance is dependent upon interpersonal and interspecies collaboration (Reference Martin1998, 2, 24)?
In Mesoamerica prior to Conquest, dance played a number of significant political and spiritual roles, but one of them, according to María Sten’s book-length study, was to “obtain the fertility of the land and the abundance of corn, beans, chilies and other edible plants, prevent drought, obtain rain, and ensure the warmth of the sun” (Reference Sten1990, 164). She points, for instance, to the fact that in the Tarahumara language, “dance” and “work” are designated by the same word (Reference Sten1990, 61). Accounts of the Maya K’iche’ dance Rabinal Achí similarly affirm an ontology of dance as energetic offering within the social and cosmic economies that mediated communal well-being (Taylor and Townsend Reference Taylor and Townsend2008, 32). Following Conquest, colonial authorities prohibited many Mesoamerican dance practices while also coercing the colonized to dramatize their own colonization.Footnote 10 Yet, at the same time that colonial authorities repressed Indigenous performance cultures, they also imposed a nested social order and a religious calendar in which those cultures persisted, amalgamated, and developed the “tradition of hiding one system within another” (Taylor Reference Taylor2003, 106). Thus, many of the festive, local dances that developed under colonial rule are “double or triple-coded:” they maintain Indigenous and African practices and values in and through the texture of Catholic ritual.
This kind of syncretism implies a layering not only of culture, but also, as Guatemalan dance scholar María Regina Firmino-Castillo argues, of the relations dance enacts between people and “non-human animals, plants, minerals, and other beings” (Reference Firmino-Castillo2016, 60). One example that appears in the choreography of Danzantes del Alba is the toro de petate, a Mexican festive dance whose origins are frequently assumed to derive from Spanish bullfighting and rodeo traditions. However, Mexican anthropologist Jorge Amós Martínez Ayala traces the roots of the dance to the region around present-day Angola, from which the majority of Afro-Mexicans descend (Reference Ayala2001). The economic and spiritual centrality of livestock in that region left its mark in the symbolic structure of the dance, where the bull (toro) is treated as a symbol of the community, and in the ludic and erotic movement repertoire, which stems from a Bantú perspective in which human sexuality, ancestral relations, and communal prosperity are linked. “Throughout the Americas,” dance historian Anita Gonzalez writes, “religious officials have viewed the public movement of the torso and/or the hips as immoral because these areas are connected with procreation. African dance forms emphasize and celebrate the movement of these areas for the same reasons” (2010, 115). What escapes the colonial frame, we might argue, is precisely that procreation, within a Bantú-diasporic lens, is incorporated into a broader exaltation of reproduction under communal, ancestral, and ecosystemic terms, where this very indivisibility belies the instrumentalized function of reproduction under capitalism.
The participatory religious character of Spanish colonialism meant that although Afro-Mexicans were initially enslaved, both slave and free Afro-Mexicans were encouraged to participate in Catholic sacraments, and to organize cofradías, or religious brotherhoods, formally dedicated to sponsoring individual saints and other ritual elements of Catholic festivals.Footnote 11 Historical evidence reveals that Afro-Mexicans took advantage of the relative autonomy, economic patronage system, and the festival culture of the cofradía to engage in various forms of mutual aid and group solidarity, and to integrate their own cosmologies into Catholic forms.Footnote 12 Within this structure, Ayala explains, the toro de petate absorbed Indigenous and Spanish elements, “lost the notion of the ritual origins of the dance,” and acquired “an appearance ‘comprehensible’ to the agents of colonial coercion” (Reference Ayala2001, 268). Comprehensibility safeguards a terrain of incomprehension, that is, a terrain of fugitive comprehension. For who is to say, in the physical enactment of a dance, where its “origins” end and its “appearance” begins?
After Mexican and Central American nations gained independence from Spain in the 19th century, the association between dance, subsistence, and the commons becomes once again an explicit object of political struggle. The ruling elites of newly independent Latin American nations sought to “modernize” their economies by appropriating peasant lands and “setting free” a new agricultural proletariat to produce crops for export. In Mexico, following the organized resistance of peasants which culminated in the Mexican Revolution, a new phase of primitive accumulation aimed at quelling rural populations by appropriating their cultural products as symbols of a unified Mexican identity. It is in this context that the Mexican state took interest in the festive dances that had evolved as multiply-coded, syncretic forms under the Catholic structure. A national school was established for folkloric dance, in which regional dances became subject to national standardization and control and exhibited in state pageantry and tourism (Parga, Reference Parga2011; Pinkus Rendón Reference Pinkus Rendón2005). The Afro-Mexican contribution was largely erased from the mythology of Mexican modernism, even while its cultural products, like the Jarocho and Chilena dances, became canonical elements of Mexican folklore (Gonzalez Reference González2010, 113-18). The folklorification of dance thus represents one of the ways in which the Mexican state attempted to neutralize peasants’ resistance to processes of primitive accumulation by fomenting a new kind of nationalism supposedly rooted in Indigenous cultures, yet simultaneously uprooting those dances from the communities in which they originated, uprooting their performance from the agricultural and spiritual calendars within which they were ordinarily performed (Pinkus Rendón Reference Pinkus Rendón2005, 28), uprooting them from what Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui might call the “semantic density” of their inscription within the local landscape (Reference Cusicanqui2014), and reformatting them to fit the spatial, temporal, and representational parameters of concert dance—a process Mexican dance scholar Pablo Parga terms teatralización (Reference Parga2011, 23). Severed, in other words, from the communitarian weaves that gave these dances meaning, the ongoing process of folklorification raises profound questions about what it means for dance to be rooted in the commons, and what it means to uproot dance.
Some of these questions confronted the TLS team directly when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. As TLS was weaving together all the elements of Danzantes, the arrival of lockdown meant that theaters and rehearsal spaces closed, sending theater companies scrambling to figure out how to materially sustain everyone involved and how to sustain the work itself. It was at that time that company members happened to see a video on social media made by Mazahua farmers from the town of Magdalena Bosha, in Temascalcingo. Donning enormous Viejo (old man) masks, they gathered to perform their ancestral dance to bless the harvest. They did so in spite of the fact that the local priest had attempted to cancel the festival because of the pandemic. Inspired by the video, the TLS team contacted the farmers and hired them to perform their harvest dance in their fields wearing the trajes that had been fabricated for Danzantes del Alba. TLS then used the footage from this performance to create a video trailer that helped Danzantes reach audiences at a time when staged performance was impossible (Figure 3 and 4). The practical need to keep Danzantes alive and the practical need for farmers to receive an extra bit of income at a difficult time was brought into relation with the practical need for a good harvest and the practical need to organize around the authority of the local priest. This encounter was an exchange, then, but not an exchange within an established system of value. It was more like an exchange of ideas toward the resignification of value, how it ought to be measured.Footnote 13 And this exchange, in turn, “added value” to the trajes, according to Vargas. It is as if the trajes accrue value by having been temporarily stitched into a network of commons-sense—in this case, the farmers’ effort to pull their festival out from under its ecclesiastical container, to assert their own self-governance, and to assert, against the history of folklorification, a reciprocal, rooted ontology of dance.
Figure 3. Screenshot from the Danzantes del Alba video trailer. In the foreground, two musicians play, and in the background, Mazahua farmers wearing the Loco de la Danza trajes perform their harvest dance.
Figure 4. Screenshot from the Danzantes del Alba video trailer. One dancer wears the “Viejo” mask, and just next to his beard, if you look closely, you can see the mottled colors of one of the Danzantes trajes as the other dancers emerge from behind the corn.
Rehearsing Danzantes del Alba
We are all assembled in a large, windowless rehearsal room, in the rehearsal room of the Skirball Theater in New York. The dancers are stretching and chatting, the TLS team is making plans and solving logistical problems. But the main attraction is clear: the trajes, which have been hung carefully on garment racks, and the many thousand colorful scraps of which they are composed. Like orchids in an industrial park, they vibrate and sing. No one can resist touching them.
After we introduce ourselves, Jorge tells the dancers about two earthquakes that occurred in Mexico thirty-two years apart yet on the very same day. On September 19th, 1985, a magnitude 8.1 struck Mexico City, leaving twenty thousand people dead, and among them, more than sixteen hundred seamstresses. Eight hundred textile sweatshops, most of them clandestine or unregistered, collapsed. The buildings that housed them were not designed to support the weight of heavy machinery and fabric rolls. The event launched a historic uprising of seamstresses, who sustained a decades-long struggle for justice and visibility in the textile sector. Yet exactly thirty-two years later, a few hours after the seamstress union held an event commemorating the 1985 earthquake, another earthquake struck. And again, due to their structural fragility, buildings housing textile sweatshops collapsed at a disproportionate rate. An unidentified number of seamstresses perished, including several believed to be (im)migrants from Asia.
A Mexican journalist wrote of the 1985 event:
The earthquake brought to light the undignified conditions in which textile workers labored: bathrooms without water or toilet paper, water jugs that were never restocked, piece-work payment (where payment is given based on completing a task regardless of how much time it takes), work shifts lasting more than ten hours, sewing under the pressure of a stopwatch, with bosses pressuring them to work faster, salaries less than ten percent of the cost of each garment produced by the workers. The women’s testimonies relate how their bosses searched in the rubble for documents, rolls of fabric, and sewing machinery, prioritizing the rescue of material goods and putting the women’s lives in second place.Footnote 14
The faultlines of the Earth revealed the cracks in the buildings, which themselves opened faultlines in the global system of commodity production, the routine paradigm of exploitation upon which profit in the textile and garment industries depends. Jorge asks the dancers to each choose a traje. What is it inviting you to do? The dancers begin to move slowly and deliberately. One throws her traje up in the air and then crouches down so it lands on her back. Another tosses one over his shoulder and walks circles around the room. Another buries herself underneath the traje with one foot peeking out, as if accessing the memory of the rubble. The dancers are working through the practical problem of how to ready their bodies—with what senses, with what sensors—to receive the histories embedded in these fibers.
Jorge: “Now we transition into something like a forensic inspection. How does the zipper work? How much exactly does it weigh? What kinds of materials can I distinguish in it? Haz una ficha…Como se dice ficha en ingles?”
The crew of multilingual dancers works together to answer Jorge’s question, finally landing on the word, “inventory.” And they get to work taking inventory, examining zippers and hems, asking questions about the origins of individual retazos, learning, in one instance, that the white strips of fabric that adorn one particular traje were culled from discarded Personal Protective Equipment during the pandemic (Figure 5). Jorge asks each of the dancers to choose the traje that most strongly resonates with them. And then to grab another one that does not resonate at all. The dancers throw these unwanted trajes into a pile and the group stands in a circle around them, silently contemplating the heap.
Figure 5. Dancer Claudia Tinageros. To Dance. To Migrate. To Move. To transform. Danzantes del Alba is the energy of new beginnings and the multiple possibilities of being, creating, living. We are part of the cycles, every fountain represents the legacy of everyone. Migrating bodies with migrant memories of evolution!
Figure 6. Dancers in the NY production undertaking an act of presence in front of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory memorial.
Figure 7. My name is Oxil Febles and I am an Afro-Puertorican woman. I love the artistic concept of the piece because even though it is complex it has a latent energy that keeps it centered. It is a sociocultural, historical, and also psychological process that pulls the dancer to the center of a collective “nothingness,” a type of exorcism of identity, of the ego, because one becomes the object. The work shows the cycle of adopting, assimilating, incorporating, and detaching that is common to immigrants. My traje connects me to my ancestors and to Woman.
There is a perspective from which textiles represent the material answer to human needs, in which labor is concrete, and in which a garment is like a proxy for a hug, the material nexus between the person who made it and the person who wears it. And there is a perspective from which the materiality of the textile matters only incidentally, in which the concrete labor of the one who crafted it matters only incidentally, in which the textile is substitutable for any other vehicle capable of transporting an invisible grain of surplus value, and in which the important question is not how well-fitting or how warm but how fast and how many. These two perspectives, Marx once wrote, converge in the commodity and yet bear no material sign of one another: “We may twist and turn a single commodity as we wish; it remains impossible to grasp it as a thing possessing value” (Reference Marx1976, 138). Here, in the rehearsal room, it as if the dancers have been asked to do exactly that. Twist and turn the trajes to unravel the absolute incommensurability between exchange-value and use-value. The dancers are told to take inventory of the trajes, to touch them, be chosen by them, and to develop relations of attraction and repulsion with them, as if they could wring out this malicious contradiction with their hands.
Jorge hands over the reins to company member Juan Carlos Palma Velasco, a professor from the Mexican National School of Folkloric Dance, who worked with Atala during the initial choreographic process and who will be responsible for teaching the choreography to the dancers over the next few days. Palma begins with a warm-up that allows the dancers to learn the basic pulsing movement that is sustained throughout the piece. They are standing in a circle and bouncing in unison. It is a rhythmic plie. That is the simplest way to put it. Yet, as Emily Coates and Sarah Demer explain in their co-authored book on the physics of dance, there are vast kinaesthetic and political distinctions between the plies of different dance forms (Reference Coates and Demers2019, 24). There is a plie that is treated like form (bend of knees). There are plies that are treated as the prelude to ascent, the momentum it provides for a jump or a spin. And there are plies that are less about transcending gravity than about enjoying its hold. The more forcefully you push into the ground the more forcefully it springs back upon you. Palma instructs the dancers to send their energy down, and to imagine their feet nailed to the floor. He encourages them to desarticular their bodies—in Spanish, joints are articulaciones, and so to disarticulate a body is to invite a sense of jointlessness. As Mexican dance theorist Hilda Islas argues, learning dance is just as much about acquiring kinetic patterns as it is about unlearning others—in this case, unlearning the structural quality of the skeletal body in order for the dancers’ movements to become traje-like, connected by seams rather than joints (Reference Islas2016, 86). With intentions downward, the plie engages the basic romance between the body and the center of the Earth, and because the dancers have been encouraged to disarticulate their joints, this force shooting out from the Earth finds its maximum reverberation through the limbs and the upper body. Bouncing together in a circle, the dancers look like fibrous bundles flung in all directions by a single, central pulse.
Then the energy, which has been secured from the ground through a rooted heel, synched into the push/pull of the Earth through a softened knee, whose rhythm is given by the synchronization of breath in the circle, where the exchange of oxygen through the collective lung taps the distant presence of plants—all that energy accumulated from telluric, atmospheric, kinaesthetic, and social processes passes now to the traje. The dancers are still maintaining the basic pulse of an Earth-oriented plie, but now they have been invited to pick up their trajes and cradle them close to their chests. The rhythmic bending of the knees gets more dynamic as the dancers learn to move the traje forward toward the center of the circle with each exhale. Because of the undulating motion of the retazos (scraps), it is impossible to tell whether the trajes are being pushed away from the body or pulled in. The movement is like an exhale/inhale, throw/catch, expel/embrace. Its reciprocal nature echoes the reciprocal forces of gravity and breath that initiate the movement. And over the course of this repetition, the interstice danzante-traje thickens, heats up.
Moments ago, the dancers had been focused on the traje as material history—the social convulsions required to bring it into being, the human wreckage that commodities require and occasion and yet which leave no apparent trace in the fibers. And now, cradling these fibers to their chests, the process of observing the traje gives way to the process of metabolizing it, subjecting it to multiple, converging forms of energy and heat. Within this tiny slice of rehearsal time, there is a methodology of dance learning where the ontology of dance is closer to the transfer of energy than the attainment of form, where energy is drawn from reciprocal relationships with human and nonhuman forces, and where the centripetal arrangement of the circle models (establishes and also represents, builds and also shows) community as such. We can see, then, in Danzantes del Alba, a role for dance that is akin to some of the practices that Firmino-Castillo has written about in the Ixil community in Guatemala and the Dancing Earth collective, where regeneration is not just about individual healing but also, in anthropologist Kristina Tiedje’s words, “the reestablishment of the ‘ineluctable relationship between humans and their surroundings’” (Reference Firmino-Castillo2016, 63). Rehearsing Danzantes del Alba, the dancers learn that before we can activate the trajes we must first plug our bodies into the array of forces that move us, and with which we are ineluctably connected. Not just pay attention to these forces, but also beckon them, incite them, feed them, until they weave together, until this weave acquires audible rhythm as synchronized breath, until a thousand retazos snap toward and away from the center of the circle like a single organism, until something you thought you were making becomes something you can ride, until you utterly lose the distinction between what you are sustaining and what is sustaining you.
If this practice could be said to offer something like ontological regeneration for a commodified world, it does not do so from a position of purity. Just as the trajes were created by cutting retazos and sewing them back together, the choreography in Danzantes del Alba was culled from various festive traditions and urban dances, as well as some “folkloric” dances, like the Baile de los Viejitos and the Toro del Petate, which emerge from the historical process of colonization and folklorification described in the last section (Hellier-Tinoco Reference Hellier-Tinoco and Randall2004). In a talk he presented at the Latinamerican Colloquium for the Research and Practice of Dance, Juan Carlos Palma Velasco analyzes the implications of this predicament for the professional folkloric dancer. How, he asks, should a dancer negotiate conditions in which his body,
“… constitutes a kind of collage of otherness, passing from a Son Jarocho to a ritual dance, from the ritual to the sacred, in occasions without the possibility of apprehension or rootedness in this experience, as if the dances of others were an outfit that after covering the body gets stored in the closet or even thrown in the trash. Working with other dances presupposes a continuous encounter with the other, the distant, the non-experiential” (Reference Palma Velasco2017).
The folkloric dancer’s body is asked to serve as the medium of recontextualization, and thus “runs the risk of being erased by the continuous flow of identities that are just as soon embodied as discarded.” Virtually on command, the dancer is asked to “move like a Jarocho without having been born Jarocho or living as such,” and then to “move like a a Tuxtleco without being born or having lived in Tixtla.” This is not just a problem of identity—a question of who gets to represent whom—but also a question of ontology. Because as Palma emphasizes, moving between dances means moving between metaphysical planes: the festive, the sacred, the representational, the real. Flattening that depth, the dancer can feel like the uprooted dances of the commons are outfits that adorn the body only superficially, only momentarily, on their way to the trash.
What Palma helps us see is that the uprooting of these dances is not only a historical fact, a geographical fact, an aesthetic fact (teatralización), but also an ongoing problem of praxis, a problem experienced by the dancing body to solve through dance. What choices can the folkloric dancer make with their movements, or their relation to their movements, to avoid becoming a purveyor of waste? How can her movements, or her relation to those movements, retain the ontological specificity of the root? What about the fact that the root, itself, is a transplant and a re-rooting, as all roots are? In one of the final moments in Danzantes del Alba, there is a culminating sequence performed by Palma himself that feels like a belated answer to these questions. The sequence begins when all the other dancers throw their trajes on top of Palma. The heap flattens and encases him. It evokes the rubble of the earthquakes, the overloading of machines in garment sweatshops that predisposed the buildings to collapse. It also evokes—as Vargas explained to me—the hundreds of thousands of tons of fast fashion waste that have been dumped in Atacama, Chile, producing a mountain so large that it can be seen from space. Yet simultaneously, at another point on stage, dancer Angel Sigala dons the mask of the toro del petate (Figure 5), while Katherine Bahena-Benitez, crouching behind him, supports the bull’s torso as the pair skillfully emulates the sensual, hip-undulating motion of a bull’s steps. Their motion evokes the whole history of overlapping cosmologies in the Mesoamerican colonial matrix—the colonial gaze that persistently censored polycentric African-derived movement as lascivious, and the Afrodiasporic consciousness in which human sexuality and spirituality are not opposed.Footnote 15 The toro’s weighty walk conjures the history of Bantú philosophies and economies repressed and re-coded, simultaneously remembered and forgotten.
After the toro has circled the stage, dancer Angel Sigala, bearing the horns of the toro on his head, makes eye contact with Palma, who has recently emerged from under the crushing pile of trajes. Then the two profoundly out-of-breath dancers approach one another ever so slowly. We see the sweat and the breath and the cognition of foreheads working out how to land delicately upon one another and share weight. And as we feel the magnetic field between them thicken, and as their heavy, synchronizing breath registers impending contact, the two dancers get closer and closer until they finally allow their foreheads to just barely touch.
A Dancer Writes of the Weave
… capital produces appearances: the social wealth that is presented to us under the form of commodity accumulation, while the concrete wealth that on a daily basis nourishes the reproduction of social life not only becomes invisible but also the activities that generate [that concrete wealth] remain conceptualized as opaque groupings of secondary issues…
Gutiérrez and Salazar (Reference Gutiérrez and Salazar2015, 24)
Figure 8. Angel Sigala as the Toro del Petate.
Figure 9. Dancer Tammz.
When asked during the rehearsal process about what Danzantes meant to her, Tammz signs “Tammz of Malaysia, in Sunset Park, BK, NY.” She rests on the fibers of the traje and reflects on care (Figure 9). “I think about my nai nai and how she made/sew clothing for my dolls and pieces filled w/ rice on beans we use to play. The weight of all the people who care for us, nourish us, clothe us to thoughts of mutual aid, collective care, and beyond.” The saturation of the colors, the red of Tammz’s scarf against the blues and yellows of the traje, the way the deep black of her sweater seems to seep into the deep black of the rehearsal room floor. All of these elements of Santos-Briones’ photography add gravity to Tammz’s words: “the weight of all the people who care for us.” The gestural flow of the words on the page, the movement between verb tenses, between ancestral and living realms, speaks to the sense of heightened possibility activated in that rehearsal room. In Tammz’s caption, there is a stream-like connection between her nai nai in Malaysia and the children she met through the Sanctuary movement in New York. As an early childhood educator, a restaurant worker, and an active participant in networks of mutual aid, Tammz is very much engaged, on a daily basis, in what Raquel Gutierrez and Huáscar Salazar call the “activities that generate concrete wealth.” What distinguishes the spans of experience that made it onto that notebook page from the spans that did not is not the presence or absence of reproductive labor, nor the distinction between being on the receiving or giving end of care, but rather the presence or absence of a community in which these activities are understood to matter. A seemingly disconnected set of memories—from dancing in Danzantes del Alba, to the act of sewing garments for childhood dolls, to the care of children in the Sanctuary Movement—what links all of them is the possibility of a world organized under the indivisibility of reproduction, which is an intellectual and political project, of course, but also a feeling. She lies down on the ground as if plugging into the interwoven network of fibers (ancestral, biochemical, textile) that sustain her life, feeling herself held by this network. “To be in this piece with the other danzantes was a joy,” she writes.
What is the nature of the dancer’s joy, when so much of dance production—including the rehearsals for Danzantes del Alba—can seem like a model of capitalist exploitation itself? If you were to theorize dance performance as a commodity, as many have, then the dancer begins to appear like the perfect(ly exploitable) worker, who lends her labor-power, frequently pushing the physical limits of her body, for compensation that does not come anywhere near a living wage, all within a practice that seems to model the most despotic political structures—what Susan Leigh Foster calls the “constant suffusion of the individual’s earnest commitment to dancing,” or an absolute obedience to dance (Reference Foster, Hardt, Angerer and Weber2013, 134). To that extent, dance labor seems to align with many other forms of feminized, affective labor in which part of the work involves producing the appearance that it is not work at all (Berg Reference Berg2014). And on the other hand, analyzing a piece that happens to be called “Devotion,” André Lepecki argues that notwithstanding these conditions, dancers also experience devotion to choreography not as simple obedience to authority but also as a realization of social change. When dancers commit themselves to choreography, they model the possibility of political action, because political action, Lepecki writes, “requires planning, preparation, technique, a collective, and the affect of devotion—as long as it is devotion not to the author of the plan, or the ruler, but an impersonal devotion to the plan itself” (Reference Lepecki2013, 25). If we were to replace “the plan” with “the communitarian weave,” then we might get closer to Tammz’s description of joy. After all, it is not easy to carry a fifteen-pound traje on your back and bounce and shake and jump for extended periods in a forty-minute performance. (Just to get a sense of that weight, I myself put one of the trajes on during the rehearsals and I felt as if the spaces between my vertebrae had instantly compressed.) How is this joy? Because work means one thing when it is grounded in a collective effort to honor the web of relations that sustain life, and it means another thing when it is grounded in a philosophy that assaults and fragments our ontological relationality in service of commodity production. I believe that when Tammz speaks of this labor as a form of joy, it has to do with the sense of shared purpose, of working to sustain a community of people from all over the world—not to mention the communities involved in the production of the trajes themselves—supplying the intelligent heat of dance to regenerate communitarian understandings of value. Sustaining the web of relations that sustain the web of relations sounds like a tautology, but it is not. It is a dance.
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