WHAT’S YOUR WOKE?

When I was nineteen I lived with a small community of massacre survivors in Guatemala: Community of Population in Resistance (CPR) Primavera Ixcán. The genocide they survived had been quietly supported, financially and logistically, by my U.S. taxes. Their motto, “They wanted to silence us, but they united us to scream out”, has haunted my nights and shaped the texture of my days ever since. 

 In this multilayered experience of projection mapping, glass silhouettes, canvas stencils, text, music and voice, I dig this story up from where it lays lodged inside my gut. Much as, so many years ago, we dug through hard earth in search of lost bones on the banks of the Xalbal River. Sun beating down, low humming in the overlapping languages of so many stitched together tribes. Mine is a story of hearing stories, thus it is both mine and not mine: a layering of complicity and of witness borne.

 Stencils and words on the wall mimic the negatives of photographs: negatives that lay in piles on my kitchen table in the casa de acompañantes of CPR Primavera Ixcán, negatives of a clandestine grave exhumed-- children’s bones at the bottom, women’s naked bones next, men’s on top. Negatives that survivors would shuffle through, looking for clues to identify lost loved ones, as they spilled their stories across the table. Small panes of glass windows send shadows of prayer across each stencil. Through these come the light and color of looped footage: bananas riding factory belts, dollars stacking, hands weaving cross a loom, the rise and fall of ribs. In the background, music. And voice, bursts of testimony from one survivor.

As this ends, black. Then the story in a music video.

Click the button below to watch it.

In the music video, this piece of my own migration story is interwoven with the migration story of another artist, Gustavo Lopera, and the haunting vocals of Yadriane De Angel. Together, we invite our viewers to reflect on their own “woke”, the story that first woke their consciousness to injustice. To imagine how all of our collective stories, woven together, could be called on to reshape the current dialogue around migration. “Before demanding deportation,” lyrics advise, “get our hands out neighbors’ lands.”