Ancestral Technologies on the Border:
a Love Letter to San Ysidro
By Cinthia Duran Larrea
Photos by Jonathan Maier
The following reflections emerge from the multilayered and deeply relational experience of being part of Ana Maria Alvarez’s class Performance Lab: Ancestral Technologies on the Border at UC San Diego, which emerges as a collaboration between the Department of Dance and Theatre, The Chicanx Teatro Ensemble, the Center For Global Justice (UCSD), La Casa Familiar en San Ysidro, and the international project of The Walk of Amal.
In the first half of Fall 2023, we dedicated our time to envisioning and creating a farewell party for Little Amal, a 12-foot puppet of a Syrian refugee child looking for her home. As Little Amal walks through different geographies (literally, she has traveled more than 6,000 miles and visited more than 15 countries), she honors the lived experiences, stories and legacies of migrant people all over the world. Amal’s presence invites the communities she meets to gather and have conversations and exchanges around the topic of migration, urging them to reframe the discourses and narratives that erase “the contributions and potential migrant people carry within them, including the hope they bring as they build new life and livelihood, enhancing communities as they do so” (1)
(1) Little Amal’s Impact, 2023. https://www.walkwithamal.org/impact/
This gesture took place at La Casa Familiar en San Ysidro https://www.casafamiliar.org/about-us/, a community-based organization dedicated to serving residents in South San Diego County. Collaboratively, we (UCSD students, faculty, staff and community members in San Ysidro) co-created a farewell party for Amal as San Diego was the last city in the US she would visit before crossing the border and starting her journey through Mexico.
The second half of our class has been (and still is, since we are on week 9 out of 10) devoted to develop a “love letter to San Ysidro” that I see as being both una ofrenda y un homenaje: an offering to all the people who were part of the collaboration mentioned above, and a form of honoring what we have built together. This love letter takes the shape of a participatory performance offering that actively draws inspiration from the reflections, lessons and relationships that emerged from the time spent together at La Casa Familiar, and that simultaneously aims to be a response to the world we currently live in. As such, the prompts that have been guiding our creative process (which emerged from our post- farewell party reflection circle) include the following:
“What does it look like to be brave, to move through courage and to not let fear paralyze me/us? "We can’t stop moving. We can’t stop creating. we can’t stop dancing - if the world is on fire we must create. Engage. Keep moving. Offer movement rooted in intention. Powerful enough to demand and manifest what’s missing and what needs to change."
“How can we embody/move and dance the concept of In Lak’ Ech : “You are another me / I am another you”?
“How do we build a world that functions like a village? It takes a village - to raise our children. What does this knowing look, feel, sound, move like?”
What does it mean to embody our ancestry? To honor our grandmothers / mothers / the children? How does my ancestry move through my body? How does it show up? What do they have to say?
As I take a moment to reflect on the many moments, exchanges and experiences that have emerged from the process of deep sharing and building that this class has been, I see a few threads unfolding:
1) The nuanced difference between community outreach and community engagement.
2) The ethical considerations, possibilities and potential inherent to engaging with each other’s ancestral technologies (movement practices inherited from our ancestors that enables access to deep wisdom)
3) Honoring our ancestral technologies by discovering what they are, tuning in to the embodied forms of knowing and relationality they teach us, and creating work rooted in those forms of knowing that is responsive, present, and in dialogue with the world we live in. I will elaborate for now, on the third one.
In a way I am meditating on what it means to “create”. Considering that we (human beings) exist as part of interdependent networks of life, culture and heritage, everything we create is a co-creation. And I think there is so much power in intentionally rooting our creative (and artistic) efforts in those ancestral technologies that teach us how to be in community, how to create joy as a resource, how to cultivate an awareness of being interdependent and powerful, and how to cultivate freedom and healing in our own bodies. In this way, the creative endeavor is an actualization and regeneration of our ancestral technologies that creates “newness” in deep dialogue with our histories and futures. And in this exercise of actualization and renewal, things, lives, thinking paradigms and hearts, are inevitably moving and shifting.
Putting these reflections in dialogue with the experiences we’ve had so far with the community in San Ysidro, with the Walk of Amal, and amongst ourselves, during our classes, I can offer the following connection: engaging in a creative process that is rooted in the deep knowings of our ancestral technologies looks like creating frameworks and participatory movement experiences for people to tap into their wholeness. Offering frameworks that invite/ give permission for others to be free, to connect with a vibrancy that is authentic, healing, re-energizing and brave. Especially brave: the world is on fire, life isn’t always easy and we need to be brave to keep pushing the boundaries (internal and external) that keep systems of oppression and suffering in place (abajo el heteropatriarcado capitalista !!!). What I believe we have been doing in class is creating from a deep grounding in ancestral technologies and witnessing the outcomes of engaging in a responsive, present and grounded methodology. We have been engaging in the task of creating participatory offerings such as line dances, call-and-response activities, joyful movement that is accessible and contagious, meant to build relationships that are in themselves disruptive to systems of alienation, segregation and marginalization. Experiences that bridge gaps between our communities by creating common grounds, or by making them visible and tangible through embodied expression.
This experience has been and continues to be deeply grounding, humbling, empowering and nourishing. I look forward to our final community sharing on December 9th, and I look forward to witnessing the ripple effects that these last few weeks will bring into our lives, our artistic work and our visions and missions as artists and human beings.
By Cinthia Duran Larrea
Prior Futuro participant, artist-scholar, dance and PhD student in Critical Dance Studies at UC Riverside
You can join the movement! Create to one of the 4 prompts above as a “love letter to our world”, and share it with us at stanley@contra-tiempo.org! Lets join together to build a more loving and just future.