(Re)tracing Heridas Abiertas (to Gloria): an exchange

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Notes

1 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 2.

2 At the time of Rojas’s 2021 performance of Heridas Abiertas (to Gloria), Haitian immigrants were gathering at the US–Mexican border in the wake of a major earthquake on the Tiburon Peninsula and its devastating ramifications. Media outlets were reporting that US border guards were using horse reins as whips against the encamped people. This border violence, and the accompanying bureaucratic “confusion” that followed, demonstrated the repeated “opening” of the wound that Anzaldúa described. In turn, such violence motivates Rojas to continually reperform the endurance-based work. See “US officials to probe whip-like cords used against migrants,” Al Jazeera, 21 September 2021, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/9/21/us-officials-to-probe-whip-like-cords-used-against-migrants.

3 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, unpublished statement, n.d. Collection on Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin.

4 Rojas uses the term transfeminista/x here, gesturing towards its geopolitically specific usage by activists across the regions currently known as Latin America and its subversion of presumed binaries. Women & Performance Guest Editor Cynthia Citlallin Delgado generously discussed this usage with us at length, noting this specificity, subversion, and the fact that, while the term was not used by Anzaldúa herself, its insertion here refutes anti-trans discourses within global feminisms and also speaks to her anticipatory theorization.

5 Emilio Rojas has performed Heridas Abiertas (to Gloria) since 2014, repeating the performance once per year for various audiences, and collaborating with different Latinx tattoo artists, whose families have connections to the Mexican–US border. Originally, Rojas had hoped to recruit a doctor who might surgically open a wound down his spine. After countless doctors refused to perform the procedure, he turned to tattooing, a ritual form with which he was already familiar. Importantly, he removed the ink from the process, so that the marks embody a wound. Thus, as a protest and elegy to the Mexican–US border and the violence it embeds within relational, environmental, and social landscapes, Rojas promised to repeat the action until the border no longer exists as a geopolitical boundary, but only a remembered scar. In this way, he has resigned himself to repeat the performance every year, opening the scar, and letting it heal. Over time, as Rojas has explained, the scar grows darker on the skin of his back and harder as the scar tissue accumulates. This iteration of the performance in 2021 as part of the survey, Emilio Rojas: tracing a through my body, in Easton, Pennsylvania marked its eighth iteration. The artist has performed Heridas Abiertas (to Gloria) in 2014 at the Lone Star Explosion Performance Festival, Houston, Texas; 2015 in the Exhibition Dagwinuu at AHVA Gallery at UBC, Vancouver, Canada; 2016 at Three Walls Gallery as part of Northern Triangle Exhibition, Chicago; in 2017 at a private tattoo shop, Los Angeles, California; 2018, as part of Spinello Projects Free! Art Week, Brickell City Centre, Miami, Florida; 2019, at a private tattoo shop, Greensboro, North Carolina; 2020, at a private tattoo shop, New York City.