Rodrigo Esteva Ramirez and Mirah Kellc Moriarty, Co-Founders of DANCE MONKS
ABOUT THE PROJECT: As a bi-cultural (SF Bay Area/Mexico City) dance company working across borders, DANCE MONKS' work is embedded in ongoing creative practices of community-responsive listening and exchange in both Mexico and the US. After 25 years of dedication (Est.1999), developing art making practices related to the mythologies held in the body and the land, we are now envisioning sanctuaries for creative expression and the healing arts as bridges of care between the two countries.
Currently, through Arte Migrante/ The Migrant Arts Project, our vision is inspired by Indigenous practices of community organizing and self determination, to incubate international spaces for gathering, creative expression, healing/care/empowerment, and dance/interdisciplinary art making focused on displaced bodies of the Mexican diaspora.
As part of this project, we are offering seasonal farmworkers and migrant families (in the Bay Area and San Antonio) free art and culturally relevant wellness services in response to their needs. We are also creating a multilingual mobile library with a focus on books in Spanish and Indigenous language. So far we have books in Spanish, Nahuatl, Mayan, Zapotec and our collection keeps expanding. Looking ahead, we envision establishing small community milpas (traditional Mexican food-growing areas ) and Tianguis (markets) to foster economic development and community garthering spaces in underserved communities. In partnership with Hijas del Campo, an organization dedicated to supporting Campesinx families, in Summer 2024, we are planning our first Arte Migrante Summer program in Brentwood, CA, an interdisciplinary arts camp free for elementary-aged children of farmworkers.
Arte Migrante| The Migrant Arts Project returns to some of the questions that we were asking in past works, Tlaoli: People of the Corn (2016) and Breathe Here: Respira Aqui (2023) about migration, vulnerability/exploitation, cultural displacement, and amnesia, while working with the arts and traditional healing practices to spark needed change and imagine new paradigms. Arte Migrante honors immigrants' vital contributions while providing needed Apapacho, spaces to rest and dream, recover ancestral memory, and ignite the renewal of sacred ways of being and relating to the body and the land. During times of environmental and social crisis, it is essential to listen to the wise voices of those who have not been traditionally heard or have been overlooked and whose cultures hold vital knowledge for these times.
October 1, 2024
APAPACHO: The Body as Sacred Ground, Creating Sanctuaries for Rest
MIRAH: We are in the third month of our weekly work offering free hands-on healing for campesinx as part of DANCE MONKS' Arte Migrante's Apapacho Project. Apapacho comes from the Nahuatl word "papachoa," which means care for the soul. We are offering this work out in the farm fields, in the packing facilities and at the headquarters of Hijas del Campo, a Latinx-led organization dedicated to supporting the immediate needs of seasonal and migrant farmworkers.
On our first day in the fields, it was over 100 degrees, and we met a group of campesinx by the side of a dusty road near an extended field of corn. We went alongside Hijas del Campo, who were there to offer water and food to the farm workers, who often do not have enough of either. Payment for farmwork is usually by weight, not by the hour, so many workers prefer to avoid taking breaks, even to drink water, for fear of losing essential wages needed to support their families, often on both sides of the border.
We brought two chairs and offered hands-on-healing to anyone who wanted to accept our services. As we listened to the stories held in their bodies, their (at times dire) need for rest was most evident; overworked kidneys, pain in their backs and knees from bending and kneeling over for hours, swollen arms with scars from injuries and torn muscles, some that felt watery and others hard as bone.
We must learn how to approach the Body as Sacred Ground, a place that carries stories, some of which are hidden and do not wish to be told. Our role is to listen (with profound respect), as these are bodies that need rest.
RODRIGO: Today is Yei Ehecatl day of Tonalpohualli, 3 Wind. Three represents the union of heaven, earth, and the region of Mictlan, the world below. Three is a sacred number of protection. The wind represents communication, our ability to transmit through words, poetry, and music.
The wind can cross the boundaries of both space and time. This day invites reflection on the resilience of Indigenous knowledge and the way in which it has slipped through the cracks and is affirmed many years after the invasion of the Anahuac. The Indigenous migrants we work with bring the seeds of their knowledge with them. Part of our work is to listen to what their voices and bodies, the voices of the ancestors, wish to say to this land, to open their path so they can grow here.
The first day we arrived in the fields in the heat of July was a powerful scene. The dust rose around us as the van moved forward, and a group of men with large hats stood in a vast cornfield, looking at us attentively. I was worried as the man who sat in Mirah's chair was about to collapse from exhaustion. He had just arrived from Mexico the day before and was already working in this extreme weather. With 20+ years of experience working as an Acupressure therapist in all kinds of environments, including hospitals, I have never worked for a group of people experiencing this kind of stress. In the distance, no shadows were visible. It seemed somewhat contradictory to see a group of men of Indigenous origin harvesting corn that day, which is so precious in our Mexican culture. I was left thinking about the dominant narrative that is not convinced of our presence in these lands and yet willingly takes our energy and also our corn, which our Indigenous ancestors brought to these lands.
It is time to reclaim our knowledge as sacred, our bodies and our seeds.
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