Part I and II of “Irvin”

HI Class,

Hope you all are well towards the end of this semester, I’d like to share here the first two parts of my three part story on an Salvadoran Performance Artist, titled “Irvin”.  Its a longer version of what I had posted earlier, on the undocumented immigrant Alejandro. For convenience, I will post here the entire piece. Looking forward to hear your thoughts and opinions on it, I greatly appreciate any suggestions form you!

Sincerely,

Xiaoting

 

 

  Irvin

How does one make sense of life? How does one, making sense of the tangible and the surreal, the factual and the fantastical?   To Irvin Morazan, there is a lineage of humanism, however defined, will carry on and through in any form, any life, any individual.  “A healer once told me, if I overcome this (cancer), I will heal my family from seven generations back and beyond.”  To him, cancer is a manifestation of traumatic childhood experiences, a karmic tribulation inherited from the past lives that has very real consequence if left unresolved, clings on.

 

“Volver, Volver”

Life is a dance of reality and dreams, spiritual practices are intuitive like artistic creativity. The sacred rituals of the ancestors can be used to create art that in turn, will heal the spirit.

The second floor space of the Bronx Museum of the Arts is like a chapel reimagined by a cubist. The four panels of wall facing the street, tilted and staggered. Lights pouring through long strips of colored glass, creating blocks of light that will please Mondrian. It is a Sunday afternoon in the Bronx. At 3 pm, the place is filled with curators, art students, friends, volunteers. Mingling people holding cocktails, people serving food. Some already sat down on the concrete floor, forming an organic stage. A noise from the stereo signaled that something is on, the crowd quieted down, anticipating.

A group of twenty people, their faces covered by zebra-print balaclavas. All of them wearing identical white cloaks, each with a white pillow tied to the waist.  One wore a hairy costume like yeti fur. They marched into the stage. Carrying with them, a gigantic out-of-this world headdress made of foam, foil, zebra and mythologies. The oldest man among them, wearing sunglasses and a sombrero, carries a guitar. As the last zebra man came on, they chanted: Aaaaaaaaaa-Eeeeeeeeeeee-Ooooooooo-Uuuuuuuuu.

This is Irvin’s dream, in this dream he is omniscient. White smoke was blown onto the yeti man, waking him. Irvin walks to the center stage and started playing a harmonica. Thin strands of sound glides through the room, revitalizing. The old man whispered in response, “Volver,……. Volver……”

He puts on the headdress, transformed into a living sculpture. Then he grinds a small slab of granite with a pestle, creating bird call as he started to unwind time. Or was it the sound of an winding tape? As he count the hours, the zebra people went about their daily activities.

Twelve O’Clock! He announced,

Happy New Year! The group cheered as they hugged one another, someone hugged a baby in the audience.

He continued to count the hours, another twelve hours passed in seconds. The yeti waltzed to the center, overtaking the dream. The group untied the pillow from their backs, gently embraces it. The old man started to sing.

Este amor apasionado, anda todo alborotado, por volver…

The group danced with their pillows, lovingly and tenderly. Dancing with their lovers, their mothers, their brothers.

Voy camino a la locura y aunque todo me tortura, see querer…

Unperturbed by the events, a couple sitting on both side of the musician, conversing in sign language. Two masked figures massaging the couple’s backs, as if to console this silent chatter.

…Y volver volver, volver a tus brazos otra vez, llegare hasta donde estés, …

Our melancholy baritone sings: Yo se perder, yo se perder, quiero volver, volver….

“Volver.”

As the song finishes, Irvin took off his headdress. He lied it down as six people carried it off stage, followed by the rest of the group. The audience cheered as old man exited last.

Performance art is shamanism, it’s theater too. In this interconnected reality, even the whimsical possess significance.

Conny

In museum’s third floor conference room, performers chattered in excitement. Elated it was over, surprised of how short it felt, ranting about the sound guy. Wrapping up with their props, tucking equipments away.

Irvin is surrounded by his students, who came all the way from Richmond to see he perform. These twenty year olds have a pious adoration for their eccentric art professor. For the very first assignment of the school year, Irvin asked them to write their own obituaries. They made Donald Trump-shaped piñatas filled with bacon in their sculpture classes.

The one left alone in the hallway was the old man. Still wearing a hat, he changed into black suits and dress shoes as if just came from a wedding. Clearly an outsider from the loud-mouthed, multi-colored youth. I walked out to congratulate him on the performance, he smiled but didn’t say a word. Alejandro doesn’t speak english. This stocky, grizzly bearded man looks in good shape, but heaves painfully when he walks.

Hiring Alejandro to sing “Volver Volver” wasn’t Irvin’s initial thought. Irvin’s first choice, a Mexican and a friend collaborator who recently moved to Florida because his son just got a job there. As an undocumented immigrant he feels a lot safer in the south given the uncertainties of the political situation.  So to make it up to Irvin, he referred Alejandro of Bed Stuy who came from Nicaragua. He has a voice full of stories and plays a beautiful hand of guitar.

As the project started coming together, Irvin has gotten to know a little about Alejandro. He learnt that they came to the States roughly around the same time and crossed the border in similar ways. Although Alejandro came as an adult at the age of twenty six while Irvin was just eight years old. He also learnt that as himself became naturalized due to young age, Alejandro remained undocumented. One of his sons who lives in Costa Rica haven’t seen him for over twenty years, he never get to hold his grandchildren.

He also learnt that he initially came to this country for a girl named Conny. A girl that he wrote a famous song for, his first love. He was sixteen and she was fifteen when they fell for each other. Her military officer father didn’t like him because he is from a lower class. To break off this relationship, the father moved the family to another city. Leaving no means of contact,  his first love is thus gone. Like other Latin American countries, Nicaragua was divided by race and class which often went together. It perhaps explains how the daughter of a Nicaraguan military man was given an Irish-German name Conny.

The story did not just end there. Heartbroken, Alejandro picked up music. He was taught to play guitar by his musician father but never pursued it. His first song was named after her. He sang “Conny” to himself at first; then to families and friends, to strangers. To anyone who will sympathize with his sorrow. He sang and sang until the whole town knew about the song. It became so popular that some even tried to help find her.

The years after saw an intensified political situation, it was a time where almost every civilian was involved in politics left and right. Alejandro also became rigorously involved with the left-wing Sandinistas. It wasn’t until ten years later they met again. She was recently widowed. Her husband and the father of her two children, a military man very much like her own father died during the civil war. Ten years later, Conny and Alejandro reunited.

1985, six years since the Sandinistas National Liberation Front overthrew the last Somoza dictator of Nicaragua. Unsettled by the burgeoning communist influence in Latin America, the Reagan administration secretly funded and trained right-wing Nicaraguan militant group the “Contras” to further sabotage the young regime. Years of civil unrest, war and corruption had left the country in a state of poverty, desperation and ecological desolation.

In the same year Alejandro came to United States. Things became difficult and he couldn’t find work back at home, and he wanted make money to support her and the children.  America was sold to him on the idea that it’s the place where money was made, besides it wasn’t really a choice to stay. Yet after he came here he was presented with a different set of reality.

Being an undocumented minority who doesn’t speak English. There were not many job opportunities and with the few left that are legal, neither were they dignified nor well paid.   Making ends meet became a daily struggle, let alone sending money back home. One cannot imagine what he had to go through these years, stranded in a country with limited means to support himself. Now thirty-something years later, debilitated by a case of bad arthritis, Alejandro couldn’t work anymore. He still lives in the project housing in Bed Stuy. He could not get welfare.

In violation of several International Laws for aiding anti-government rebels, the International Court of Justice ordered United States to pay billions of dollars in reparation to Nicaragua. United States refused payment to this day.

In the car ride back to Brooklyn, we begged him to sing “Conny” for us. He said he was ashamed to keep in touch with her because he was doing poorly. He said the relationship faded with time, he hadn’t heard from her again. Time had passed and all there left was a song, Alejandro still chokes up when he sings about her.

 

“Something never gets talked about”

Irvin said, I got a chance to do this performance, with a thousand dollars from the Bronx Museum, it went to Alejandro. He is undocumented, he has got arthritis and can’t work, but he has this beautiful talent. That’s why I hired him. Instead of making big sculptures I hired an undocumented immigrant to sing a song.

“Going back to me, the reason why I am making this whole performance was that I was twelve when my mother was deported. I didn’t see her again for another two years. They locked her up in Mexico for three months before they deported her.”

“There was no structure back then, so they could do what they want with you. What happened with Trump’s administration and Obama’s too was that they deported a lot of people. The children stayed behind because they are citizens. It’s fucked up to separate these families, and it’s exactly what happened to me. I’m making my performance piece about that, it’s about this loss and divides. This beautiful Spanish song is about passions but to me it’s more than romance. It’s an intimate emotional song. That’s why the title of my piece is called Volver Volver, it means Come Back, Come Back. The song Conny talks about his love for her and this song he performed today…  all talks about this distance. This lost love, usually not because someone choses to leave but because wars and all these external reasons. It separates people. That’s something never gets talked about.”

“ We are all kind of screwed up, my story is crazy but there are millions of these stories. This is what’s happening to a lot of people right now.”

“So how did you reunite with your mother?”

“She came back through the border, illegally.”

The Estranged Father

The tattoos on Irvin’s body is a map of archaic symbols. On the outside of his left elbow is a six-legged jaguar, tail curved and sharp claws sprawl about. Tracing upwards are morse code-like dots and dashes. Those are Mayan numerals that spells: 1, 9, 8, 5. Inside his left elbow, a feathered serpent with tail coiled. Its mouth agape and fangs exposed, howling silently towards him. Juxtaposed on his inner right elbow is a salamander depicted with elegant, fluid lines. Also facing him, it clings onto his elbow in a playful, gentle grace.

The salamander is his mother, the archetype of all that’s kind and loving. In one of the rare photographs they had taken together in Salvador before the separation,  she wore a sleeveless dress holding Irvin who was no more than five years old. They stood under the tropical sun and in front of the lush vegetation of Salvadoran suburbs, her face glows with gentleness. When he grew up he would have his mother’s eyes. The feathered serpent represents his father, who he had not been on speaking terms with for decades. In his eyes, father is the haunting dark cloud that looms over the family.

When the eight year old Irvin moved to United States to live with his parents and sister, the family lived together in a Spanish-speaking suburb of New Jersey composed of a largely working class neighborhood. Father is a mechanic who gets bitter when he drinks. He does not talk much let alone communicating with the children. Mother runs the house with the little money that they had. She is quiet too although she sings sometimes and loved the children abundantly.

One of the things Irvin will never forgive was when his father burnt all of his drawings. Drawings of dinosaurs and flowers and cars and houses. He was a quiet child whose favorite thing in the world was to draw, thousands of drawings strung around the house.  One day his father came home, his breath pungent with alcohol. He said son, you are not allowed to draw anymore. You have to become a man now.

He took all of his drawings to the front yard, he took all the blank pieces of papers and the pens and color pencils and crayons, started a bon fire and everything went up in flames. He never forgot at that moment that he wanted to kill his father. Like a cub he was small and powerless. He had just turned twelve.

He could have ran away, but who would be left to protect mother and sister? From then on he told himself that he must get bigger. Buying time in his own home so that one day he will be strong enough to defend himself.  He also took up photography in high school which for reasons unknown, his father did not presume as unmanly. The time came when he was seventeen. During one of the usual episodes of drunken rage father threatened to terrorize his sister. Saw this Irvin went outside and came back with a wooden club. He went up to his father and told him, from today on you are not allowed to abuse anyone anymore.

Father stood facing his son, staring back at him was a fully grown man taller than him and much stronger. The feathered serpent deflated. He went to the bedroom to collect a few things and left the house. From then on there was peace at home, because he never came back.

 

“ Fuck Your Wall”

The day after Donal Trump was elected into office, a grandmother in Hawaii created a Facebook event that invited friends to march on Washington in protest. The Facebook post quickly caught traction as thousands of women signed up. “The Women’s March” took place a day after Trump swore into office. A record of five million people worldwide of all background and agendas took to the street on January 21st, 2017. The march in Washington alone drew a crowd half a million strong. Blossoms of pink knitted hats dotted Pennsylvania Avenue paled the White House in comparison. Amongst them was Irvin whose face fatigued from driving but showed verve in a bright red sweater. He held overhead a big shiny silver board with letters in bold:  “ Fuck Your Wall”.

For him, its personal. After all, his entire family came to this country both legally and otherwise. Especially himself who came to the country alone as an eight year old. He feels for all the people who went through and are going through what he had. His work has gotten more political as well. When the Bronx Museum of Arts commissioned him for an exhibit, he focused on the issue of undocumented immigrants.

Exhibited concurrently with the performance piece were some sketches, some were works of his own while others were sketches he collected from undocumented immigrants he personally knew.  Sometimes things work in strange ways, little did he know this very project would lead him back to father.

Until recently, father’s life was a mystery that he didn’t know much about. Partly because he never talked about himself, partly because Irvin hated his guts. His father is still undocumented and lives in New Jersey. Irvin had not seen him since his mother’s funeral ten years ago. He has been collecting the drawings and thought of him as he drove from Richmond to New York. He called his sister.

“Oh is he there? Can you ask him if he wants to do some drawings with me? He doesn’t need to know how to draw, it’s just a game.”

Father wanted to see him so it was happening. Irvin brought along his partner Patricia, an artist from Chile to be the mediator since they could not be in the same room for more than five minutes and he wanted to ask as many questions as possible. Quite as expected, there was a wall between them, luckily father was softer to Patricia and talked.

At some point Irvin noticed that he drew those lines very well. Father said he used to be an artist when he was little.

…What?

He said when he was twelve years old, he became a child soldier and they didn’t allow him to draw anymore. He had to throw away his pencils and pick up a gun. At the same age when he burnt all of Irvin’s drawings, somebody took away his drawings too.

When Patricia asked how he got to this country, he really started talking.

It was the end of the 70s in El Salvador, civilians were being massacred for protesting against the fraud election of president Carlos Humberto Romero. Paramilitary death squads that was initially funded by elite landowners just begun to consolidate into government’s military intelligence service. Under a fiercely repressive regime that murdered thousands of students, union leaders and activists; more people were becoming radicalized by ideology of the proletarian struggle. Father had an older brother in San Miguel who was a political activist that wrote propaganda and protested on the streets.

Considered a dangerous communist, one day the death squads kidnapped his brother along with other communist protesters, tortured and executed them by blowing their heads off. Afterwards, they hung their headless, mutilated bodies upside down from a tree in the middle of the city to instill terror in other protestors. It was only from the shirt he wore did father recognize his brother’s body, a shirt that he had bought for him.

At that time father was just twenty seven years old. A famous mechanic in his town and married with two little children. Fearing that he will be considered a communist because of his brother, he took the family and fled to the countryside of San Salvador to stay with the children’s grandmother for a couple of years.  When Irvin reached two, father fled to United States. Two and a half year later, mother joined him. Even with parents in United States, the government could still hold Irvin and his sister in ransom so they would return, yet the government was dealing with more pressing issues at hand.

In October 1979, civil military group “Junta” staged a coup that displaced president Romero. They then enacted a land reform program that was fiercely opposed by the elites. Death squad killings soared. The final straw was the assassination of archbishop Oscar Romero during an open mass on March 24th, 1980. Due to Romero’s calling upon Salvadoran soldiers and security force members to disobey orders of killing civilians. A week after saw a further forty two mourners killed by government sponsored snipers at his funeral.

In May 1980, several Salvadoran revolutionary fractions coalesced into Farabundo Marti para la Liberación Nacional, or FMLN. Named after Farabundo Martí, the insurgent hero killed by National Guard who lead the indigenous farmers uprising against landowning elites half a century ago. They officially declared insurrection against the military.  A decade long civil war ensued.

 

An Ancient Humanitarian Crisis

Over millenniums, the many volcanoes that clustered in Salvador incessantly spew forth fertile ashes. Warm climate provided the sun as well as an abundance of rain water that falls from the sky, thus bore out of these elements a thriving tropical biome. To the east of capital San Salvador lies the second largest lake in the country, Lake Ilopango, it was once an active volcano crater. Some scholars believe that the great pyroclastic flow produced by a severe eruption of Ilopango in 5AD devastated Teotihuacan in the valley of Mexico, contributing to the downfall of this great Mayan metropolis. From the decline of Teotihuacan rose the Toltec civilization.

The Toltecs worshipped Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent god who commands wind and rain. The stone steles and sculptures discovered from places inhabited by the Toltecs revealed a culture obsessed with war and human sacrifice.  Stone carvings often depict jaguars, eagles and coyotes eating human hearts as well as serpents feasting on skeletal human figures. In fact, the name “Toltec” is believed to come from Mayan Ch’orti’ language which means “expansion of the bruisers”, it could also be translated as “mutilators”.  Archaeologists believed the rise in human sacrifices may have created a moral crisis that caused several Nahuatl speaking groups to disperse from the valley of Mexico. Some of them fled south to the western part of where now known as El Salvador, linguistic studies traced the first wave of migration to as early as 800 CE.

An alternative theory suggested the migration was caused by a bloody war waged between two familial lines of Toltecs over succession to the throne. The defeated clan went on exile to Central America. The people accompanied the defeated Toltec clan were called “Pi-pil” which in Mayan Ch’orti’ language means “companions on the journey”. Regardless of theories, it is clear that the indigenous people who inhabit El Salvador today came here to sought refuge.

Irvin remembered playing on those ancient steppe pyramids that are hidden in the jungles of the countryside, desolated and forgotten. Like the ruins of Tazumal, those were remains of a lost memory.  Although Irvin’s grandfather was a descendant of the Pipils, he was brought up with very little native knowledge. Since “La Matanza” in 1932 and the subsequent government sanctioned killings that targeted indigenous people, his grandfather were among the many others that abandoned their native ways and language in fear of persecution.

Perhaps time is circular, maybe human history is a memory of places and  continuous migration. A few thousand years later this child would join the narrative of his ancestors and embarked on a treacherous journey to seek refuge. Except unlike his Pipil ancestors, he would have to make it alone.