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Sueño con Serpientes
○ pam


   
    Performative essay-ritual addressing the complexity of borders in relation to gender, race, beliefs, European colonialism and the Mexico-U.S. divide. Using electrical muscle stimulation on my body to represent the oppression of patriarchy, I navigate stories about my ancestry. 

2024
Format  mixed-media lecture performance
Software Ableton Live
Media performance, dance, spoken word, sound, EMS machine, mirror, organic matter, fossils, candles

Concept, creation, technology, text, and performance by pamela varela
Sound with Concepción Huerta
Technology with Marlot Meyer
Performance with Gabriel_le Taillefert and @nnast_antn

Special thanks to the LAF teachers and students :) 
Inspired by the book “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza” by Gloria Anzaldúa

This is a first prototype of a work that is still in progress.


Exhibited at
Jahresausstellung, Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg, DE, 2024











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         Sueño con Serpientes is a performative essay-ritual journeying through the transgenerational memories of my body. Dedicated to my great-grandmother, it is inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza”, a book addressing the complexity of borders in relation to gender, race, beliefs, European colonialism, and the Mexico-U.S. divide. I embody these stories; my right side is manipulated by electrical muscle stimulation, symbolizing the oppressive control of patriarchy, while my left side labors and seeks its sexuality. Seduced by the snake, I slither between mythology, anecdotes, facts, poetry, and dance to tell you a story about my ancestry.










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          The structure of the work is a ritual, where I start by tracing a circle while embodying a slithering snake, and then, I introduce fire, earth, water, and air. Eventually, I dance to find my snake... 

Fire is candle, for Candelaria, my raped great-grandmother.

Earth is for avocado, the testicular green gold of Mexico.

Water is for the snake of the Mexican emblem, eaten by an eagle in Lake Texcoco, the patriarchal origin of Mexico City. 

Air is for my reflection... my dreams, my thoughts, my poems, my dances. 

Center is for my umbilical cord, my first connection to my mother, which my father kept in his possession for 30 years and which just recently came back to me.  

Everything is mirrors because Mesoamerican cultures believed mirrors were portals to the spiritual realm. Gloria Anzaldúa could see the Coatlicue, the snake in her, through mirrors. 

Coatlicue, meaning the one with the snakes skirt, was the creator goddess and the mother of Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of the sun and war. When the Christian evangelization process was carried out, she was converted by the Spanish into the Mexican version of Virgin Mary: la Virgen de Guadalupe. 





candle - fire
avocado - earth
umbilical cord - center
snake fossil - water
reflection - air

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       My physical voice recounts my anecdotes, stories, poems, thoughts.

      My virtual voice recounts facts: etymologies, histories, traditions, mythologies. 

      My body is torn. On my right side, my father's side, I feel the eternal, omnipotent presence of patriarchy through the pulsating shocks of an electrical muscle stimulation machine. 

      My left side, my mother's side, labors—it struggles to move around space and to perform the actions of the ritual—a journey to find its lost snake: its sexuality.


To understand the whole narrative, please read the text at the end of this page :)


























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My great-grandmother’s name was Candelaria, yes, from candles. She was born in 1920 in a Ahuacatlán, Nayarit, Mexico. Ahuacatlán means the place of avocados. She came from a poor mestizo family with roots in the Coras, an indigenous community of the area. At age 14, her parents moved to work at a hacienda of some rich Spanish owners. The administrator of the hacienda, mister Manuel Varela, a Spanish creole who was 63 years old at the time, liked her and took her as a sexual slave. She gave birth to their first child at age for 14 and eventually had nine more children from him. One of them was the father of my mother. Eventually, my great-grandfather the rapist died. She moved to San Luis Río Colorado, a border town in Sorona, across Arizona. For a living, she cooked food for Mexicans who worked in American fields. There, she met a man who helped her obtain the American residency and married him. She died in Yuma, Arizona, only to be brought back to Mexico in the form of ashes.







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Last spring, I was in Mexico City and went to buy avocados. Next to the big American supermarket Walmart, there is always an old man selling fruits and vegetables for a better price. He gets his supplies from the Central de Abasto, the biggest market in the world. It feels better to buy things from him. For years, I have seen him there and politely greeted him, sometimes buying, and sometimes just passing by. He is always very nice and respectful and doesn’t say much. However, this time, he was surprisingly chatty. It all started by him telling me that I should take care of myself because I was gorgeous, in his own words. Somehow the commentary felt both like a blessing and like a threat; but I decided not to think too much about it. Then, he continued to tell me his whole life, and how he had supported his wife and his 15 children. He told me he had crossed the border as a mojado, a wetback, an illegal immigrant, four times during his lifetime. He looked tired now, for the first time a bit delirious. I hope he can stop working soon, but can he?



















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Once for a writing class, I had to choose a spirit animal for myself. I decided I would be half and eagle and half a snake.







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The first time I crossed the border walking, I was 14 and crossed from Sonora to Arizona, the borderland where my great-grandmother died. Part of my mother’s family lives in both sides of the border, and when they visit each other, they speak about it as if they are going to the neighborhood next door. We went there, queued for a few minutes, and entered the badly lit room. The policemen were joking amongst each other; they barely looked at us. The conveyor belt and the metal detector looked old and broken, did they even work? I was confused, wasn’t this the most mythical, troubled, and busy border in the world? We crossed in a matter of minutes, walked a square… it still looked like Mexico. I was still confused, where is America? That legendary place that stole the name of an entire continent: America, named by Martin Waldseemüller, a German cartographer, after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian cartographer. We walk another square, and then everything changes; we are suddenly in a movie set --fake trees, paper houses--Somerton, Arizona. For many years after that, during my ignorant adolescence, I thought that the border was just a big deal. If my cousins crossed everyday back and forth to go to school, what was the fuzz about it? Little did I know then about my privilege. I am not the one the police cares about.












    






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If the deer dance grants you access to your dreams, does the snake dance grant you access to your sexuality? Haunted or hunted, poseída o perseguida?






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Some months ago, my dad sent me a message telling me that he had found my umbilical cord, this 29-year-old piece of flesh, my first connection to the world, to my mother. Gloria says that there is an ancient Indian tradition of burning the umbilical cord of a baby girl under the house, so she will never stray from it and her domestic role. Oh my god, I panicked, I had to get it out of my father’s house. It took me one month in Mexico by reminding him every day to manage to get it from him. Now it is safe and with me. Many cultures regard the belly button, our first scar, as a point that one must protect because it is open for negative forces to enter it. I wonder what it meant for my father to hold my body and that of my mother for as long as I have existed... I’m glad we are free.




















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En noches de luna llena, es más probable que te encuentres a La Llorona. 
Cuenta la leyenda que La Llorona fue una mujer indígena que, por un mal de amores con un hombre español, mató a los hijos que tuvieron juntos ahogándolos en un río. 
Como castigo por su acción, fue condenada a vivir deambulando por los pueblos y las calles en busca de sus hijos, llorando y lamentándose.
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On full-moon nights, you are more likely to encounter La Llorona. 
The legend says that La Llorona was an indigenous woman who, because of a bad love affair with a Spanish man, killed the children they had together by drowning them in a river. 
As punishment for her action, she was condemned to live wandering through the towns and streets in search of her children, crying and lamenting.












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skin
sea
she
sinsun
sex
safe
sane
seed      
sign 
soul
soil
spin
soft
spit
star
shell
siren
shine
smell 
skull 
sense
sonic
shake
sweat
shame
sweet
scent
swear
stone
shape
spirit
symbol
spiral
savage
serpent
spelling
spell
...
Sueño con
Serpientes


circle














fire




















earth




























water























air

































































center

























































snake











































































     



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The Mexican-American border snakes its way from the earth and ends its path in the water. At Border Field Park, between California in the US and Baja California Norte in Mexico, the fenced wall continues all the way until the ocean. Gloria Anzaldúa writes: “The US-Mexican border es una herida abierta, an open wound, where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds.” In 1846, the US troops invaded Mexico, marking the start of the Mexican-American war. The hostilities forced Mexico to give up 55% of her territory: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and California, leaving 100,000 Mexicans on the other side. She was sold, la tierra. Apparently, says Gloria, the fence has been torn down multiple times by Yemayá, the Yoruba goddess of the sea.




















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The word avocado comes from ahuacatl, a Náhuatl word, the language of the Aztecs, and it means testicle. Avocado was a gift from the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl, the feathered serpent, to his people. Known as the green gold, its current market resembles that of cocaine.





















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The Aztecs were a tribe that eventually became the most important empire of Mesoamerica. It is said that in the 13th century, they migrated from Aztlán, a mythical place somewhere North. Some think it was in the state of Nayarit; however, Gloria thinks it could have been in the US Southwest. She calls chicanos, her people, originally and secondarily, indigenous to the Southwest. The Aztecs migrated following the orders of Huitzilopochtli, god of the sun and war. He told them to establish their civilization at the place where they saw an eagle eating a snake. They found this place in lake Texcoco and founded Tenochtitlán, today’s Mexico City, the oldest capital of the American continent. Today, the eagle eating the snake is on the Mexican flag. The interpretation of Gloria is that this symbolizes the triumph of patriarchy. The eagle, which represents the yang energy, fire and air, won over the snake, which represents the yin energy, earth and water.




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The dance of the deer is a mystical dance to enter the world of dreams, practiced among certain indigenous groups of northern Mexico. The deer is seen as a deity in the culture of the Pascolas ritual dancers of Sonora. The dance has gone through very few changes from prehispanic times to the present day. 


























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Coatlicue was the mother of Huitzilopochtli. She was the goddess of fertility, of the Earth. Her name means “the one with the snakes skirt”. When the Spanish conquered Mexico, they performed an evangelization process to convert Indians into Catholicism. They knew Coatlicue was adored and was the mother of the sun god, so they converted her into Virgin Mary, the mother of the sky lord Jesus. Her Mexican version is called Virgen de Guadalupe. She is a dark-skinned Virgin Mary and, nowadays, the most adored religious symbol in the country, the symbol of the mestizo. Coatlicue was both creator and destroyer, she held both light and dark sides, life and death. The Spanish desexed her; their culture could not accept darkness as a quality worthy of the mother of god; hence, they eliminated that aspect of Coatlicue: her snake. Gloria writes “The Coatlicue State: Something pulsates in my body, a luminous thing that grows thicker every day. Its presence never leaves me. I am never alone.”




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The word Mexico comes from Nahuatl and is formed by three particles. 'Metztli' which means 'moon', 'xictli' which means 'belly button', and the affix '-co' which means 'place'. Therefore, the word Mexico means “belly button of the moon”.
















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Malintzin, La Malinche, was an indigenous woman from Veracruz, Mexico, the port where the Spanish arrived. She was one of the slave women given as a tribute to the Spanish by the Indians of the region. She could speak both Nahuatl and Mayan, and that is how, after also learning Spanish, she became the translator of colonizer Hernán Cortés. Eventually, she bore their child, the first mestizo. In Mexico, there is a term called “malinchismo”. This is a word that means an attitude that shows attachment to a foreign culture and rejection to one’s own. It comes from Malintzin, who is regarded as the woman who sold out her people. Gloria says “The worst kind of betrayal lies in making us believe that the Indian woman in us is the betrayer.” She says that Mexicans have three mothers: la Virgen de Guadalupe, the mother who has not abandoned us, la Malinche, the raped mother whom we have abandoned, and la Llorona, the mother who seeks her lost children and is a combination of the other two.



















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In Mexican Spanish, the words SERPIENTE and VÍBORA are used interchangeably. Serpiente means serpent or snake and víbora means viper, a specific kind of poisonous snake. The etymology of víbora, viper, comes from Latin “vivus” which means “alive” and “pario” which means “to give birth to”. No surprise that the snake is the symbolism of life and death. Moreover, the word venom comes from Latin and means “drug, poison, a charm” and is ultimately derived from Proto-Indo-European *wenh-, “to love”: the symbolism of love and pain.




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 pamela varela © 2024.