All That Moves Us: The Semantic Density of Clothing and Objects in El Buen Vestir-Tlakentli’s Choreographies of Indigenous Movements

Abstract

This article explores El Buen Vestir-Tlakentli 2 (2017 and 2019) and argues that the two iterations of this dance-theatre piece are powerful explorations—through dance and the artists’ sensate relation to objects—of the moving journey that led artists Leticia Vera and Carlos Rivera Martínez from Mexico to Canada and from a sense of estrangement from their Indigeneity to an encounter with their ancestors’ complex and resistant negotiations with the oppressive forces ushered in by settler colonialism in Mexico. Shedding and layering clothes and leveraging the knowledges they encode, the artists remind us of all that moves us in the world. Through inhabiting clothes saturated with meaning, the dancers embody their ancestors throughout the performance, returning to them to better understand the past, its violence, and its joy and imagine a future remapped through decolonial geographies. This future, the author contends in conversation with the artists’ own words, takes the form of a hopeful reconfiguration of the symbolic space of Aztlán. Critical of its problematic past entanglement with race yet mobilizing its transformative power, the artists create a space where Indigeneity is no longer relegated to the past, where kinship is articulated on radically different terms, and where it might be possible to shed the layers of settler-colonial violence—gendered violence in particular–that continue to impact the everyday life of Indigenous women and girls.