A Polyphony for New Worlds in Abiayala: The 2024 Lozano Long Conference

By MARÍA JOSÉ PÉREZ SIÁN

THE 2024 LOZANO LONG CONFERENCE, “Indigenous Lands, Resisting Sexualities in Abiayala,” held April 18 and 19, was a space for enriching a dialogue that included diverse voices and bodies from across Abiayala.¹ Different from more traditional academic fora, the conference introduced an unconventional dialogical format that did not always require spoken words, but included complicit gestures, disruptive performances, dance, and individual and collective silences. These manners of expression represent strategies of survival and everyday forms of knowledge for many Indigenous peoples who do not always use academic terms and concepts to communicate meaning. 

In these dialogues, artists, activists, academics, students, and the general public exchanged ideas and opinions on individual and collective experiences of violence, resistance, joy, creativity, justice, and even revenge expressed against the ongoing colonial projects in the participants’ respective territories and nations—without necessarily reaching a consensus. 

These unusual and uncomfortable conversations occurred over two days in and outside the Glickman Conference Center at UT Austin. This article aims to thread some of the ideas, sensibilities, and perspectives that were shared during the event, as well as those kindly provided to the author in personal communications written after the event by some of the participants.  

Fire 

The conference featured exciting presentations and performances by Indigenous artists and activists, focused on non-heteronormative and antipatriarchal perspectives of sexual and cultural politics. These presentations provided a valuable complement to the academic proposals presented during the gathering. On the first day, Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla broke with conventional perceptions of what an Indigenous person should be. On the reasons for her work, she reflected as follows:  

What motivates me is the impulse to generate new narratives of our stories. As a trans Mapuche woman who grew up within the rural experience and then became a city dweller, I try to rewrite my history from a non-hegemonic perspective, which is connected to the history of people who have lived through dispossession. My motives are political and affective, a crossing of different meanings, trying to configure a way of expressing ourselves that makes us think of new possibilities of existence.   

In her presentation, Kütral discussed how she embraces the night and how she feels the unyielding rage of Abiayala in her heart. She explained that her name means fire in Mapuzungun and emphasized that this element not only destroys but also regenerates. Kütral underlined that fire sustains ideas, affections, and desires, and can be understood as a fever that extends throughout all bodies and territories. These insights resonated with the Indigenous artists and scholars present at the conference since we share a common understanding of fire as essential for sustaining life, purifying, communicating with those who have passed, and building collectivity. It is an energy that accompanies us throughout our lives and deserves our respect. 

Later that day, the power of Lukas Avendaño’s performance, titled “Ya no me verán la cara” (They Will No Longer See My Face), burst upon and interrupted the daily routine of UT’s exterior common spaces. In a public outdoor courtyard, the artist wore a white forensic jumpsuit drenched in red water, which he then took off, revealing his half-naked body, to denounce the disappearance of his brother Bruno in Mexico. 

Enforced disappearance is a phenomenon that profoundly affects society as a whole, upends family and community dynamics, perpetuates mourning indefinitely, and alters the cycles of life and death, provoking terror in the population. By 2022, the official number of victims of this crime registered in Mexico by the National Registry of Missing or Unaccounted-for Persons had reached 100,000. In Latin America, according to the United Nations, Argentina (3,065 cases), Guatemala (2,897 cases), Peru (2,361 cases), and El Salvador (2,284 cases) topped the list of countries with the highest number of forcibly disappeared individuals in the period from May 22, 2021, to May 13, 2022.² On violence and the absence of violence, Lukas expressed the following:   

Certainly, there exists something that stands in opposition to violence. It is worth noting that different forms of violence are social occurrences; they do not manifest themselves on their own, but rather are created. Violence cannot exist without our intervention. Violence is created, it returns, it is bought and sold, and continuously circulated for consumption for the rest of the world, which acts as a spectator, and by those who benefit from it. The antithesis of violence can be termed “human dignity.” [Human dignity] is the resistance that we exercise in the face of violence, as a response to violence . . .     

Lukas added, “No matter how much I work, as I develop my work, violence is still there. Violence is systemic, and my effort is just a craft, like that of a graffiti artist scuffing up the walls of violence. Violence remains, it doesn’t flinch, it continues on its way despite my resistance.”  

K’u’x (Heart) 

To open the second day of the conference, Ty Defoe (Oneida and Anishinaabe), danced and shared stories that intertwine dance, identity, territory, and creativity. The dialogue circles on this day highlighted water as a unifying element. In his performance, titled “Sueños debajo del Ja’” (Dreams Underwater), Maya-K’iche’ artist Manuel Tzoc Bucup delved into the concept of ya’-ja’-joron-agua, or water, from the Mayan cosmovision. “This performance piece implies thinking of the element of water as sacred,” explained Manuel, “pulsating with k’u’x (heart), mobility, and fluidity, a living entity that has been sickened by our bad environmental habits.” On this element, in particular, Manuel has written:  

Water, as a living entity, has different life dynamics influenced by its surroundings, the place where it is found, its depth, its source and outflow, its way of breathing, and its relationship with the air, the wind, the fog, the clouds, the cold and the morning dew. Sacredness in Mayan thought—considering water as sacred—should not be equated with sacredness in Western Christian thought. In the former, sacredness is rooted in appreciation, love, and esteem for someone or something.³    

The idea of k’u’x was taken up again by Bianet Castellanos, who addressed the experience of Mayan women and their right to land. She discussed the concepts of mu’uch kuxtal and ti’ool to explain the essence of community in the Mario Villanueva neighborhood (colonia) of Cancún, Mexico. She also highlighted the significance of always connecting land, autonomy, and the efforts of women to establish resilient communities capable of surviving in the face of multiple forms of dispossession. 

Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa, who identifies as chola,⁴ explored the concept of radical love in the Andes, known as munay. She explained that her work is motivated by “various factors, including intimate feelings and the desire to produce alternative forms of knowledge about historical processes that greatly impact us [as Indigenous peoples].” Her work also attempts “to discover alternative approaches to engaging with ‘cultural products’ [i.e., books, films, photography, etc.] that are, ultimately, individual and collective forms of expression.” Olga’s presentation resonated with many in the audience as she revealed intimate details about her relationship with her mother, an experience that, while personal, reflected many of our shared experiences with motherhood, work, scarcity, and migration.   

The Mirror, and Other Reflections 

In the same way, the performance by Edgar Soliz Guzmán, from La Paz, Bolivia, who defines himself as “pobre, cholo, and maricón,” was moving. In his presentation, titled in Quechua “Allpa nanay: ¿maypitaq kachkanchik ripuqkuna?” (Land of Hurt: Where Are the Gone Ones From?), Edgar used a mirror in which people could see their reflections, while asking point blank: “How many maricas,⁵ women, and Indigenous people have died in the name of your development?” This made the whole room uncomfortable because it was impossible to avoid wondering about the role that each one of us plays in such human, social, and environmental destruction. This questioning, he said, is in line with the broader political commitment of the Maricas Bolivia Movement, to which Edgar belongs:   

Our work as Movimiento Maricas Bolivia entails a permanent and urgent questioning of the patriarchal system, the system of all oppressions. We believe in the political act of naming ourselves Indian and marica because by doing so we stretch to their limits the notions of race, gender, and sex, categories that seem sacred even in these times of “plurinationality” in our territories. That’s why we want to shake everything up, why we avoid institutionalized forms of activism, because we claim the street struggle of other political subjects who are not gay, but marica, Indian, old, HIV-positive, fat, peripheral, chola, migrant, worker, peasant, and a long list of others. That is why we are mobilized by a community action that “sees ourselves” and “understands ourselves” in the Indigenous territoriality. We always bring up Adriana Guzmán’s metaphor of antipatriarchal community feminism[,] about looking at ourselves in the mirror, seeing ourselves politically, and knowing that we are not white, we are Indians.   

The above experiences and reflections lead us to question mainstream LGBTIQ+ identities and positions that often fail to consider race and class privilege. Embracing identities such as Indio, Indigenous, chola, and marica adds complexity to social and political struggles and requires reconsidering the boundaries and potential of sex and gender identities in different contexts.   

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To conclude, the following are a few excerpts from the final reflections of the Lozano Long Conference, which are important to consider when assessing the significance of this international meeting.   

I found the conference to be a space of acceptance, curiosity, and affection, with room for dissent and criticism. Even though it was only two days, it was a transformative experience for me. It was incredible to see performance artists embodying theory with their bodies and words, and academics sharing not only the language of research but also their personal and family experiences that end up binding together a large part of their written work. (Olga)  

I leave [this gathering] with the feeling of having recognized myself as one more graffiti artist, among many others, who paints hope [on the walls of violence]. It allowed me to see myself as accompanied, motivated, and strengthened . . . (Lukas)  

I appreciate that the organizers fostered a kind of affective sudaka⁶ community in which we could meet and look at our Indianness, foster dialogue, and create community. . . . I feel there is a gringo university, made stagnant by the benefits of the capitalist system, either producing or co-opting everything. . . . On the other hand, there’s the Latin American sudaka academy, within the gringo university, that is more dynamic and that challenges everything. This makes me think about the places of oppression that one carries, the territoriality that we carry when we migrate, which drives political actions aimed at building community and generating knowledge that reaches beyond academia. (Edgar)  

The conference was a fertile field for learning. I had the opportunity to learn about the political, affective, and creative realities of people I did not know, and reconnect with colleagues whose paths have been separated by distance. This brought me comfort. After the conference, I went on my way with a stronger desire to build new relationships with my body, my desires, and my environment. Sometimes, traveling to an unknown, distant place allows you to see reflections of yourself in others, helping shape the person you will become when you return to your territory. (Kütral)    

Conversations spawned by this conference and that were left unfinished prompt us to consider the importance of these spaces at a time when universities are deliberately curtailing opportunities for diverse representation in all its forms. Critical thought should encompass the recognition of difference and the legitimacy of dissent. Spaces like this conference are essential to academic life and must be defended and valued. Just as artists and activists from Abiayala carry out their work to somehow graffiti, scratch, crack, shake, and tumble the walls of exclusion and violence in their respective contexts, so must we, as academics, continue to imagine and create alternatives that provide strength and hope in the face of a system that seeks to erase the Other. ✹ 

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María José Pérez Sián holds a BA in Anthropology from the School of History of the Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala; an MA in Social Sciences and Humanities from the Centro de Estudios Superiores de México y Centroamérica of the Universidad de Ciencias y Artes de Chiapas; and is currently a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on violence and genocide, feminisms, bodies and sexualities, and transitional justice.   

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Notes  

The author would like to express her gratitude to Kütral Vargas Huaiquimilla, Olga Rodríguez-Ulloa, Lukas Avendaño, Manuel Tzoc, and Edgar Solíz Guzmán for their valuable and thoughtful contributions to this article. Conference presenters provided translations of K’iche’ Maya, Mapuzungun, and Quechua terms and expressions.  

1. The organizers of this event, Professors Luis Cárcamo-Huechante and Enzo Vasquez Toral, emphasize that Abiayala is an Indigenous transhemispheric concept of space/continent referring to the territory commonly known as the Americas. 
2. United Nations, Report of the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances (New York: UN, 2022), available at: www.ohchr.org/es/documents/thematic-reports/ahrc5131-report-working-group-enforced-or-involuntary-disappearances (accessed on 27 May 2024).
3. Conceptual proposal sent by Manuel Tzoc to the 2024 Lozano Long Conference organizers, explaining his performance “Sueños debajo del Ja’.” 
4. Chola or cholo has been used since colonial times to refer to Indigenous people or the descendants of Indigenous people from Peru, Ecuador, or Bolivia. It is usually derogatory, but has been proudly reclaimed by some groups to refer to themselves and their identity.
5. Marica is a derogatory word synonymous with faggot. The term is being redefined by collectives, such as Movimiento Maricas Bolivia. 
6. Sudaka is a pejorative word used to describe South American immigrants. The use of the term in this article refers to its reinterpretation by Movimiento Maricas Bolivia.