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This keyword article is about how hemispheric, Latinx, Afro-Latinx, transnational feminist, and queer "performance" is rooted in an understanding of the importance of rematerialization as a vitalizing, regenerative force. This means that performances take on multiple forms of presence that refer to everyday acts of creative expression as resilience. Further, performance practices in these contexts are tied to ritual acts that serve to ignite moments of recognition, inspiration, and action for communities.
Keywords
AFS ethnographic thesaurus: Performance, affecting presence, politics, activist art, commemorations
Sabes tú que la vida sin amor jamás es vida.
-Sabes Tú, bolero sung by Chelo Silva, composed by Manuel E. González, Chelo Silva La Reina Tejana del Bolero, c. 1958-1964, Arhoolie Records, track 2
We must also understand that after the gesture expires, its materiality has transformed into ephemera that are utterly necessary.
-José Esteban Muñoz (2009:81)
this article is about how hemispheric, Latinx, Afro-Latinx, transnational feminist, and queer "performance" is rooted in an understanding of the importance of rematerialization as a vitalizing, regenerative force. The epigraphs above show how Chelo Silva and José Esteban Muñoz pose the affective and the ephemeral as important sites for making meaning in Latinx1 worlds using folk understandings of feeling and becoming. Bonds of feeling are made manifest through embodied practices that create realities that make life livable for the Latinx feminist and the queer subject, like Silva and Muñoz, respectively (Vargas 2012; Chambers-Letson 2018). This means
that performances take on multiple forms of presence that refer to everyday acts of creative expression as resilience (Taylor 2020:4, 248). Therefore, when Muñoz further turns our attention to how "the ephemeral does not equal unmateriality . . . it is more nearly about another understanding of what matters," he highlights how [in queer dance] lived moments never disappear, how moments shared and gone can be resuscitated through performative modes of being (Muñoz 2009:81). This view of performance as a re-enacting materiality is deeply tied to work on Latinx ritual with regard to how a community's performances with and for ancestors serve to ignite moments of inspiration and recognition in regenerative forms of being and becoming with shifting kinds of materiality (Otero 2020; Pérez 2019; Gaspar de Alba 2003).
The title of this piece purposely calls upon...