Transcript - "The Radical Capacities of Ghosts, Auto-Deportation, and Art”
October 11, 2021 -- Radical Kinship Series
Listen to "The Radical Capacities of Ghosts, Auto-Deportation, and Art”.
LETI VOLPP: Good afternoon and welcome to this afternoon's event at the Center for Race and Gender, “The Radical Capacities of Ghosts, Auto-Deportation, and Art”.
For anyone who requires a live transcript, please click the caption button on the bottom right hand of the screen.
Let me begin by noting that today is Indigenous Peoples Day and also give a land acknowledgment.
We take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin (Hoo-Choon) the ancestral and unseated lands of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Muwekma Ohlone tribe and all familial descendants of the Verona Band. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has, and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land. Since the institution's founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of Community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university's relationship to native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgment, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley, more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples.
My name is Leti Volpp and I'm the Director of the Center for Race and Gender here at UC Berkeley. We're thrilled that you can be with us for today's exciting event. Before I introduce the moderator and curator of today's event, let me thank our co-sponsors for today. A big thank you to the generous co-sponsors, “On the Same Page, the Multicultural Community Center, the Undocumented Students Program, and the Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative.
Let me now introduce Alan Pelaez Lopez, who is the Center for Race and Genders, Arts and Humanities Initiative Research Scholar and the curator, and the host of the Radical Kinship Series. Alan is an Afro-Zapotec artist and scholar from Oaxaca. They are the author of Intergalactic Travels, Poems from a Fugitive Alien, published by The Operating System 2020, which was a finalist for the 2020 International Latino Book Award, as well "To Love and Mourn in the Age of Displacement", published by Nomadic Press also in 2020. Thank you so much and I will now turn it over to Alan.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you for that introduction, Leti. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining us in this digital Zoom space or Facebook live, If you're watching on Facebook live, I'm very excited to have this. Panel slash conversation today the “The Radical Capacities of Ghosts, Auto-Deportation, and Art”.
I want to introduce the two panelists, so give me one second while I share some of their work.
Our first presenter will be Dillon Sung. Dillon Sung is a multimedia artist and community organizer based in Southern California. Dillon's research as a PhD student and Provost Fellow of American Studies and ethnicity at USC is on the question of migrant self determination and the conditions of possibility for full participation, for stateless peoples, considering the historical function of Korean statelessness in particular. Her interdisciplinary work analyzes how effective practices may generate resistive subject formations for the speculative potential of stateless socialites in imperiling the notions of citizenship, settler colonialism, and nation statehood. She also informs and engages her research with an art practice through discourse of fiine art, namely social practice and performance studies. Dillon is a 2019 to 2021, Imagining American Page co- director and the lead artist in developing the Stop LAPD Spying coalition archive. I say 2020-2021 rapid response for a better digital futures fellow at IP.
Our second presenter. Is Cesar Miguel Rivera Vega Magallon and they are a queer, formerly undocumented Mexican poet and an advocate for migrant refugee and returned slash deportee rights. Born in Guanatitlan del Alto Jalisco Mexico. They resided in northern Los Angeles County for 25 years before self-deporting back to Guadalajara in 2018. Their poetry and prose focuses on migration spiritual and psychological tolls and on the loose threads of the colonial tapestry. Their self-portraiture attempts to visually establish clandestine forced migration to the broader legacy of colonialism and imperialism. Cesar Miguel short story, “We, Saracens” we Saracens won the first ever “Things I’ll Never Say” prize for fiction in 2013. Their essays have been published in The Huffington Post, Motherland Scene, Color Block, and other platforms.
I'm very excited to be hosting the both of you on campus, particularly because you two are stellar scholars and artists, who I site on my dissertation and I feel like it has been a long time dream and having an initiative, a year long initiative that invites scholars and artists who think about undocumented, unauthorized and illegalized migration. So first up, I'll give it up to I'll give the stage to Dillon. Iif you want to reintroduce yourself in the title of your presentation.
DILLON SUNG: Hi everyone. Thanks for having me. Excited me how nice of you. I'll be. I am currently in Los Angeles or the land of the Gabrieleno-Tongva Villages. And Los Angeles also gets it’s water, in part from the Owens Valley or or Paiute. Which is not as well known.
So I will be reading from my short story essay title is “Sounds and Silence”. Yeah. Should I just? Go right into it. OK. OK. So this is kind of like a creative nonfiction.
So when my mom was looking for a warehouse space for her growing small business some years ago, I followed her to the small office that was up for sublease from a ghost. That was the man on the lease. At one point, she stepped out of the room for whatever. Reason. And the ghost reached over and squeezed the back of my bare neck. My hair was short then and I think I was wearing a. Shirt and jeans. Disgusted, I told my mother on the car ride back home that she should look for another space. Demonstrating on her neck how the ghost had squeezed mine. She said that the touching might be unsettling, but that we would never be able to survive if we responded to every indig indignity by running away.
Is that why I still chose to remain in the US than self-deport to Korea? It was a stark reminder that the idea of choice under neoliberalism, some myths, especially for working-class women. My mother had likely tolerated words in her. Life. Months after my mother subleased the warehouse space, she told me that she had yelled at the ghost and some of his workers after they had called out suegra suegra as she walked past them. Neither she nor I knew the meaning of suegra at the time, but my mother clearly inferred its me. A Spanish-speaking friend whom I asked about the term explained that, though respectful, when said to a close female relative, it was deeply disrespectful if said to a female acquaintance. Having listened to the story of why I was asking, my friend urged me to keep myself and my mom away from the place. Some months later, the warehouse burned down in a fire. My mother lost everything she had kept there. It has been speculated that the ghosts were one of his associates set the fire themselves for the insurance money, though he apparently ended up having difficulty with his claim because his insurance policy did not allow for subleasing on the property.
What is the likeliest path to safety between running away and compliance refusal and consent? What hurts less and protects you more? I have tried but failed numerous times to find a recuperative angle to this antidote. Anecdote. I cannot figure if what happened with justice Karma or just patriarchy. But it was an illuminating experience of how my mother and I, different generations of undocumented women survive in, at times conflicting ways. Despite being born from care. That brings me to awareness of the interdependent nature of how I move through the world. The kind of independence and autonomy that I at times crave for its for its inaccessibility, for it marks the free subject, feels unwise when you are seeking liberation, a single body might not have enough capacity to endure and navigate such experiences, which must be why we have two between ourselves, my mother and I. I have lived with my mom all my life except for about 8 months or so. She too has never once to live alone, except for those months, though we have lived before without my father or sister on several occasions. We have been each other's constants. We had. We were recently able to pull together savings to buy a home. And with it an illusory sense of stability. We live in a one bedroom house with four cats and I'm lucky to have a separate studio from the main house where I sleep and have my own space.
Though my mom has scared me awake more than once by hammering on my window or door, her mind blank in the face of a household mishap or phone scam relying on me to handle it. Well. A year into our new house, two men in green, wearing bulletproof vests with the word “Sheriff” across the back wrapped on our front middle door, a sound too loud and assertive for 9 in the morning. The knocks on metal made me want to check the side entrance to the house as to confirm that it was locked, but I resisted this urge. Wary of the sound it could make. Instead, I kept alert still to how palpably porous and vulnerable the boundaries of our home were.
I had scheduled a presentation by organizers from the Scott Valley PD spying coalition in my class that day, so the possibility that I have been targeted for my various political activities flickered in my mind, accompanied by my quickening heartbeat. I'm a goner. I thought there's a six foot wrought iron gate and fence securing the front of our house. Had the gate been unlocked? Had they somehow managed to climb over it, or had they been let in? Our neighbor quickly slipped into his car and drove away. He was also from an immigrant family and would later ask us what happened for for the visit to have happened. What the reason would later ask, but the reason for the visit had been.
When I finally answered the door, the sheriffs asked for a name I did not know, and after feeling assured that I was not lying, they left. My mom, who had been observing silently from the doorway of her bedroom, asked what the visit had been about. So I explained, sharing my initial alarm that perhaps I was the one they were after, that I would be taken away. I remember being relieved at the time of how in that case at least, my mother would have been there to witness it. That I could have told her to look in my phone to contact a close friend familiar with migrant justice organizing work. I have heard stories of people kidnapped by ice whose families searched for them for hours until they thought at last to look in immigration detention.
You should have asked me to answer the door, my mom responded. I wouldn't have mind speaking to them instead. She is just as undocumented as I am, perhaps even more so, but she has normalized giving up her body from me. At times I have not noticed this willingness to sacrifice. Other times I have enabled it. Only after I graduated from college did my mother confess to me how hellish in existence the eight years she worked to put me through art school had felt. She tells me now that she regrets encounter encouraging me to follow my happiness instead of urging me towards a. Well-paying career. I forget I regret it at times as well.
Growing up without healthcare, my mom spent months during my tween years coping with an emerging thyroid condition before she sought treatment. In the years that followed, the condition would alter her face and body beyond recognition and in ways my mother would never come to. Accept. She had, however, nitpicked about her appearance long before her thyroid had changed it. A habit that I had learned and carried throughout my life. I like to think of it as a deceptively protective gesture. By being dissatisfied with how we look, we evade ourselves in the world, making ourselves less knowable as to make ourselves less vulnerable. Our everyday lives are filled with habits of protective gestures. Most times, unrecognized, and perhaps ultimately ineffective, but to comfort us enough to get through each day.
My bed, a loft made from donated lumber to maximize the space in my studio, is one I made myself using woodworking skills I learned during my undergraduate years. I designed it to fit in the space over my sink and toilet. I did not, however, think to include safety railings and did not seriously take my mom suggestion to have the ladder affixed to the bed frame.
So months after I fell off my bed from the ladder having slipped from under me, leading to minor injuries and a mild concussion, I began imagining bloody Mary's skeletal and rotting hand grabbing at my ankles just before I reached my bed. As I have a bathroom just below it. Is a bathroom still a bathroom if it includes a bed, the sheriffs follow a juridical boundary, but what kind of boundaries do Bloody Mary adhere to?
I could have died in that fall. I could have been swirled across my tiled bathroom, dash bedroom floor, unable to get up. I might have not been found for hours. Would Bloody Mary have embraced me as kindred or as foe? I eventually dragged myself up and walked over to the house to tell my mother what had happened. She promptly gathered a power drill and screws so I could attach the ladder to the bed frame, which came with an obligatory. I told you so.
I still grapple with the theorizing of undocumented folks as in a kind of social death. I have grown tired of being called dead, an alien, a zombie, a ghost, or some kind of other abstract transgressive category. When I first began applying to graduate school several years ago, I met up with a friend who had offered to look over my applications, and we had talked over food about Trump, our lives, and the potential of our dead cells. As we parted my friend's last last remark was that they felt fairly alive. But we're already dead, I quipped. And we laughed. But I have grown weary of laughing about being tired of being dead. It feels less affirming and more like a reminding I cannot escape.
The night before the new semester began, I stumbled upon a Facebook post Larry read about supernatural sightings and experiences in certain rural parts of the US, and how farmers in those places closed their blinds at night to block their windows and the curious noise is coming from outside. How a passenger in a car caught sight of a human like being tearing towards them in the dark. The name of the creature was blacked out with a digital. Scribble. Scribble. Better not to will the creature into being by invoking. It. I wondered if I too could summon such creatures if I wanted to. Could the ties they had to particular American landscapes be transgressed by the conjuring powers of my mind? Was I foolish to assume that even though I was undocumented, I was American enough to summon American phenomena?
A friend who is also undocumented in Korean, once shared with me that hours after their suicide attempt many years ago, they had seen an aberration of the Korean version of the Grim Reaper, Jeosung Sata, in his traditional attire of a black Pembroke and cut. I feel almost certain that it would be the Jeosung Sata who would appear for my mother when it comes for her time. When I die from where and when? Will which creature claim me?
Each night I take myself out of the house to sleep in my bedroom in the separate studio just a few feet away. That night out, however, the familiar heaviness that caused my eyes and shoulders to sink was accompanied by a reluctance to walk outside into my bedroom. The thought of the loudness of the side door shutting behind me, combined with a brief walk to my room on a dimly lit path with faint solar power, solar-powered safety lights, and the deep shadows cast by the moonlight that somehow seemed darker than the night sky, made me imagine the humanoid creature as feared by the darkness and unexpectedly spry for something so gangly and heavy. I wasn't sure if this creature was meant to scare me or comfort me. If it was a steward or a stalker. Perhaps I was afraid of the uncertainty.
For months afterwards I slept with my lights on. The next day, my first day back at school. I came to. I came home and realized that my mom. Was not there. I typically enjoy having time to myself away from the watchful gaze of the mom opticon I sometimes find myself singing or humming out loud when I'm alone. I was certain my mother was out chatting with a friend and I recalled the creature I might have conjured into being the previous night.
I was hesitant to fall for at first to call and check where my mom might be, knowing she would make fun of me for worry. Instead, I sent her a text about the cats, our favorite topic. So let's get a quick response. I sat by the kitchen table with one of the cats and tried to finish up my class readings. I was reading part of the Woman Warrior where Maxine Hong Kingston writes about ghosts of and the Chinese and how 1 character's actions as a strong woman can overcome such. The image of the previous night's creature flashed through my mind once again. I then heard what sounded like two soft gasps in a pitch resembling the voice of my mother. Whatever bodily transformation my mother might have undergone during her lifetime, her voice has remained the same for as long as I have known her. The Facebook post has warned about not being fooled when creatures imitate the voices of those you know are not at home. Both my cat and I turned our heads toward the unlit hall by the side door, the direction from which the sound had come, but saw saw nothing. As I turned my head back towards my book, my gaze paused for a moment at the black of the kitchen window. It reflected nothing but night. I was reminded again of the story of the farmers who would avoid their windows after their after dark. I pictured for a fleeting moment my mother outside, fallen just beyond the side door, gasping and calling for my help. I forced myself to ignore these thoughts, reasoning that she could not be in the backyard as I had checked it within the past half. Hour. Resisting all urges to respond to my fears, I instead continue to read at the kitchen table, waiting for a phone call. I could feel my pulse thumping in my ears. I saw myself then as I was sitting in the kitchen alone at night and the silence I often prefer. Had I somehow managed to conjure an independence and autonomy? Would I be sitting alone yearning for sounds and silence from here on without the rest of my life. My mother eventually called to tell me she. Was on her way home.
Thank you.
CESAR MIGUEL RIVERA VEGA MAGALLON: Thank you, Dillon. Always really touching to be able to share space with you and to hear your work. You're someone who has shaped my way of thinking and who has really influenced my work. So being able to hear this in person during this space internationally and being able to still be in communication community a lot and so.
So just to briefly reintroduce myself I am Cesar Miguel Vega Magallon, or Cesar Miguel Magallon is my ex-husband. I am calling today from Guanatitlan del Alto in the northern suburbs of Guadalajara, and I couldn't really go through this presentation without acknowledging. So when Guanatitlan in Nahuatl means a place of offering, it has the same root as the Nahuatl word for communion in the Catholic Church. So here.
The Canyon walls reverberated with Kora Masawa Purepecha Otomi, who sharika and later Nahuatl speakers as they came with the Spanish Flyers and the conquerors who came speaking Spanish and praying in Latin. The people of western Mexico before there was a Mexico before the West was the West right next year to trade and to politic. When Titan isn't the occupied and unseeded land of one nation, as I often hear in acknowledgment stateside. Here the land doesn't bind to people in a tradition here the land, the land breaks up the ingenuity that really blooms under the tropical sun into the full spectrum that this land supports and has supported for millennia. When Titan means place of offering, today it offers me the opportunity to speak to you. The real privilege to be in this space with people whose ingenuity I admire.
Today, I suggest we offer our labor and our genius. In hopes that we can bring about Justice one day in some form, whatever form for the people who originally met in the shadow of these canyon walls. And also for our canyon walls. Thank you.
So moving quickly into the. For the presentation, the title of this is (inaudible), which is my sort of pseudo latinic riff on a poem dedicated to the city of Milan that was written. In the medieval period. And I went through this process of self-deportation. Dillan was one of the last people actually saw. In Los Angeles. And she gave me a disc that was signed that someone had given their father as when they were a taxi driver. It's in my drawer right now. So one of the most prized possessions.
And I did a return to Guadalajara. I reflected a lot on what life was in the United States and undocumented clandestine migrants. I reflected a lot as to what my goals were and extracting myself from the legal framework that had rendered me a a semi-person and that immigrant rights movement has sort of restored to some quasi dignity, since pseudo sort of personhood and citizenship. Through these terrible sacrifices and actions that really marked my generation as the previous generation, after a decade of mass migration from Mexico to the United States. So I have spent, now, I believe, two decades looking in manifestos in psychological studies, in publications and theory books and log reviews for an answer as to what was done to us. Not how we became undocumented in the process of migration, not solutions for the bureaucratic hurdles that had given us this sort of very narrow confine to navigate and to survive. I didn't, really see and answer in any of that. And psychological research regarding CPTSD for migrants, I could see how someone could evaluate the manifested symptoms that someone exhibits after going through these traumatic migration and then the process of surviving being illegalized, having the rights taken away. But I couldn't see something else. Which was the spiritual and sort of existential and and the phenomenon of phenomenological consequences, of being undocumented, you know.
I remember the first time on Spring Street and 2nd in Los Angeles. One of my friends joked about pushing another friend into traffic and yelling new visa right as the only possible way for us to find a solution. For being illegal. And at the time, I think it was funny. Now I reflected on it with a lot of sadness that in that moment we were 22-24. Some of them were teenagers or 18-19. Violence being maned, potentially killed was the only theory solution we've come up with for our condition, and so this made me realize that there would be hidden taboos like almost erotically charged fantasies of ways to escape being undocumented, one of them was being deported, right. Eiither by triggering the act, which would make the inevitable finally happen, and the sort of lingering drama, or by doing it yourself by self-reporting, which is what I chose to do in 2018.
So I've said that in other talks, but the laws that restrict our right to work, the laws that restrict our ability to move even licenses, aren't really just dissented or disincentives for contested migration. They're really attacked on our personhood. If you cannot drive, you cannot work. You cannot feed yourself. You, as a physical being, in space and cannot not move your mass either by means of the locomotion of a vehicle or through just the kinetic energy of your own muscles. That's something that really shapes a person, really marks you. Beyond just the legal question, beyond just these enumerated rights privileges that we've now sort of ceded and decided to go ahead and give up to this totem of citizenship that American Society seems to redefine every year. Those spiritual and psychological consequences I think are significant and deep, and I think about them quite a bit.
So I was nine the first time I could remember my mom say that she felt like she had died when she was followed by a cop after picking me up from school. And she could manifest physically all of these calamities that would happen if she was pulled over by the police. She could not just see them in her mind, but she physically felt them. The loss of futures that she had wanted, the sudden manifestation of the past that she had fled. Where there physically present in her body in that moment. And I thought to myself, I don't kno]w how to explain this. To someone whose mother is lucky enough in this life to only die once, right? Because my mother died many times, and so did I as. I grew up.
So I came up with this idea. You know that migrants really experienced time in the flattened ribbon, a flattened loop that the past is always present. We only really live in the past in the sense that we are always reminiscing about a status quo, anti border. a status quo before we were undocumented. And that the future is always looming and starting to come down from above. To make the past alive with all of the horrors and the violence and the personal shames and the personal intimate violence that we suffered that cause our migration. And this the present gets lost. And this the present can't exist. Because the present is always teeming with the ghosts of the past and the threat of the future. And there's no space to live in the present. There's no space to enjoy. Even the joy of being undocumented and for example, some of the ridiculous humor that comes out of the immigrant rights movement comes from this really like taboo and almost sardonic sense that you know life life sucks. As an undocumented person, and that the future isn't really a future, it's an inevitable consequence. That were just stabbing off. Some people with advanced degrees. Other people with drugs and alcohol, other people with families. And mortgages, but that the future will will come one day and we have to accept it.
I rejected that and I decided to self support and try to make a life in a country that I was told was inhabitable. I realized when I returned that return is a futile search. That people talk about returning to a place, but that's not what they mean. If you more sophisticated folk, we'll talk about returning to a space and time. At that time also doesn't exist because the memory of not being documented is also slowly transformed, influenced, and colored. As you re, you reinforced it with images, with photographs, with party conversations about what you were like when you were younger. And these memories aren't really your memories, they're constructed. Returned for undocumented people like the experience of time, is a return to an imagined place, an imagined country in an imagined time. And in this sense it becomes an impossible search for the thousands of doors that were closed. When history intervened very personally, very physically in our personal lives and our personal history.
So to do this, I decided to photograph myself. One materials are used to make it easy, right? No models, no suspense. It's the best that I could do. And and I realized that there's this great archive of photography and really a lot of theory on my background in art history. A lot of theory and history about the photograph as a colonial tool. But also of colonized people appropriating their camera. And even if it's impossible to escape from anthro, anthropologizing gaze of the camera or the photograph. That there's some mobility, some latitude within that to perform, and to act. And I thought, I thought that was freeing. If I couldn't be the best version of me that had never left Guadalajara, the version of me that never learned to speak English, the version of me that never had a a heard a Taylor Swift song in the Target dressing room. I couldn't access that, but I could play that in front of the camera for just a couple of minutes, right?
So I put this little presentation together. Images that came out of this project and ongoing series “Laudes Guadalaxarensis Civitatis” or the ceramic and textile arts of Jalisco, which is a photographic series that's becoming object, and the performance that I'll get into in a liittle bit.
In commemoration of the third year return this external servant you sent into exile in Jalisco for posterity marks here this poem from the pen of her bards unworthy of troubling the erudition and refinement of your mind or your eye of the noble race of Alta California.
This poem attached this image is DithyRambos II, Laudes Guadalaxarensis Civitatis. The images were modeled after type photographs from South Asia and West Africa that had studied in undergrad, but also from trade journals that Mexico published to try to encourage the export of ceramics and textiles and leather goods, but also tourism to places like (inaudible) and Guadalajara, where it was active tradition.
So I began to sort of feel my way through my identity through these objects, objects that are exported and that in the United States, anyone who's part of a migrant diaspora knows right ceramics for some reason and textiles, these things that are made by hands that have these strong sometimes racialized and gendered overtones. He come almost charged and magical objects. I could never find a Talavera right in Los Angeles. When I first migrated. Now they are everywhere. And they're very easy to find. So some of these objects that you'll see in this series of postcards, and there will be printed postcards and sent via post to ICE Testing Center to USCIS Processing Centers and a couple of my ex boyfriends cause I'm spiteful, sort of to practice border crossing. I can't make it over the border. I have a 10-year bar or permanent bar. I'm not sure yet, but I can make it through the border this way, right? This is a way of me escaping the totalizing nature of the border via post. Corridos de Mexico, in God's will, right? So all these images were produced by me, taken by me, edited by me the postcards printed both in commercial format, but a couple of big plays for some close friends who were reviews given and post. And there's a couple right. These platters from (Spanish) and this is an antique that has been in my family for a while. And I adopted the postering image, the auto sort of anthropology auto anthropological gaze, to try to fit myself into this mold of being Tapatio, or at least Jalisciencse. It. Because I realized when I returned that I wasn't. That I was very much not this right. Questions of gender and sexuality, virility in color and race became very apparent in my return. I went from being a person of color. I think the color is beige or greige. I'm not sure anymore. To being part of the ethnic and political majority of Guadalajara. I was no longer racialized in that sense. I experienced a crisis.
I was also certainly perceived as very male and very. People would introduce me to their daughters because the way that I dress and the way that I spoke didn't give it away, that I was clear in the way that it did in the United States. And so this series is a way of sort of playing to these stereotypes, these types and colonial photography, trade photography and tourist photography that allowed me to sort of explore these feelings and and really the discomfort, the humor, the sort of ridiculousness.
The fact that Tapatio is at least you're in this part of Mexico and in that diaspora. Really have this flat identity based on these images based on movies with Pedro Infante. That's based on songs of Vicente Fernandez and that that identity is almost as flimsy as the one that I had constructed as an undocumented person. And so now I'm returning to what? right? I'm not sure yet. This is one of my favorite shirts I bought the board up actually in the Orange County. My mother asked me why I wear it. She thinks I'm gonna say something bad about her every single time I wear this on in front of a camera which is not always the wrong. And this series has been ongoing and I've sort of been exploring the link between cultural production here in Guadalajara and the diaspora and my own identity as a returned migrant and outer deportee, not always sure what that means. It's quite just yet this process that allowed me to think through it in a more physical way. In a way that really centers myself and my image. And my body in a way that I wasn't used to thinking about. Because I don't want to think about my body as undocumented migrant in the US.
So this postcard series has led me to sort of also think about Guadalajara. About the nature of religion and spirituality here, especially around the the feast day of La Virgen de Zapopan, whose miracle was a figure of hurricanes in Spain through and she pacified the Indigenous people, the innocence, to accept the faith of the Spanish and to stop killing the Spanish. Guadalajara only exists where it exists, because it's the only place after four attempts were Spaniards didn't die. And through this been able to sit archetype and stereotypes. I think this is what my mom would have wished I was like actually right when I was younger. If I had stayed in would be done. But that wasn't the case. So this series we printed and sent, as I mentioned, and I've also been working on this same series looking at. Textbooks, books photo books calling cards for sex work here in Guadalajara, which is a major unspoken tourist attraction of western Mexico, Puerto Plata and Guadalajara, and being able to sort of see how it ties to the economic development of the region, but also how it ties to this kind of miigration in this wave of meth migration from Mexico.
So looking through this series of posters and postcards, I've also been forced to confront the nostalgia industry. And the way that there's a real, I think, multi $1,000,000 industry just based on images and printed material that really preys on people’s runcated sense of belonging and desire to see themselves reflected in these fantasies of what they would have been like if they had not been forced to migrate. And it has proliferated, I see it all the time. There are embassy programs and consoled programs in the US right now to help people live this sort of fantasy and become these people of these images and these songs. Which is for me rather hilarious now having experienced both.
And these were a little couple few posters that I made for this series, actually in the honor of this lecture. Because I was so touched to be able to speak with Alan and Dillon today, again appropriating the images of classical Tapito movies, classical images of masculinity that migrants really pined for in the exterior and that aren't really true anymore, right? No one actually dresses like a Charro except person events in Guadalajara, but it's still sort of something that people pine for both here and in the exterior.
And of course, the poem, Laudes Guadalaxarensis Civitatis. The second dithyram that I wrote on the plane ride coming into Los Angeles, thinking about how long it had been since I saw Guadalajara in the valley and not being able to understand why what I saw the Palos Verdes Peninsula from a plane leaving LAX said it felt like California was sticking her hand out and asking me to stay.
And I thought this must be what the rest of my life will be like. That there is no return. Because my return is impossible. Instead my life will be a constant process of returning to places the people that never existed and could never exist. And this series through art has allowed me to explore those possibilities and to really make peace with the impossibility and the non-existence of those things. So. Thank you, folx.
Canto y no llores because I'll never forget you. Guadalajara. That's very much true. And yeah, that's all from me guys.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Cesar. Dillon, thank you so much for your presentations. I filled up two pages of notes (laughs) from both of your work. Let me just check on the time. All right, so we got about 20 minutes to have a conversation amongst one another. and one of the things that I saw in both of your work is Dillon, for example, you post this really interesting question. Which creature will claim me in your in your in your essay. And you also theorize the ghost as either a a steward or a stalker. And I think that Cesar had in the presentation you just gave. You also talked about the ghostliness of undocumented-ness or how you frame it being a semi-person. And you you you start out with your mother and the notion of like the loss of futures. And being able to the loss of future manifesting in the body. Which is also kind of like a ghostly thing. And I'm wondering if both of you can talk a little bit more about the. Why ghosts are generative to think about the experiences of undocumented-ness or illegality or unauthorized crossings or returns.
CESAR MIGUEL RIVERA VEGA MAGALLON: I think listening to Dillon’s essay and thinking through my work and my own experience right. II think ghosts are another way of referring to the indexical mark right of the border crossing. And thinking about and some artists have done this, I think, with varying degrees of success, the performance involved of becoming a migrant. Leaves certain things unresolved, leaves traces of unfulfilled goals and ideas of relationships that were not of fully developed, of things that were never concluded back home, right in this place and time that we're suddenly displaced by it, and from. And so ghosting generative for me as I heard Dillon speak. Is that these ghosts aren't sort of like these haunting things filling empty rooms, but rather they are these timelines, these truncated futures that we still live with. And they live with us because I think on some level they provide us with something. Whether it's comfort even in the pain of loss. Something that migrants I think have written extensively about. or they are. Sort of. In the reverse acknowledgments that what we're passing through at this moment. Wasn't always, wasn't for sure, and inevitable and will not be there for the foreseeable future. I think they offer us glimpses into those possible lives that we imagine and that we carry in our body and as we sort of learn more about epigenetic stress, as we learn more about sort of the inheritable nature of trauma and stress. I think for me it's an alternative in a way of escaping of this totalizing and inevitable suffering of immigrant people, right? Ghosts become an escape door. Ghost become company to this is very lonely, isolating process.
DILLON SUNG: Thanks for your presentation, Cesar. I am realizing, right? I think through this discussion I'm I'm realizing why I'm still here and you left. Because it's very. I feel like we're. I think about things kind of similar like phenomenon phenomenologically temporally but it's quite different conclusions. So, ghosts? I'm not entirely sure what the figure of the I'm undecided. I used to think am I, are we? What are we until but? Please. I kind of I I I like the ghost as yeah as Cesar was saying like as a kind of indexical tool. And immaterial kind of a stand in for something immaterial. In and not knowing whether. It is. I am it. It is me. Or if it is just something that circulates and enters us. And is expressed through us. I don't think I was very. Last bit abstract, but yeah, for the essay I was quite. I mean, I'm still quite uncertain about the role of of the gho ghost and my relationship to it.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you. Part of the reason why I asked that question is because it seems that ghosts have a mobility that migrants do not. Ghosts migrate through folklore, they migrate through stories, they migrate through lived experiences. They migrate through architecture. And and and and for Dillon. When, when I first read your abstract and as I was listening to your essay, I was thinking a lot about how much a ghost can move and how limited the undocumented, unauthorized, legalized body has to mobility. And I think Cesar that's a way in which you also opened up your art talk. And you know if a ghost sometimes ghosts are subjugated to like imaginative spaces and Cesar you talk about how, when, when migrants this want to return, they return to them in an imagined space. And I want to see if either of you can talk a little bit about the imaginative space of art. And why you gravitate towardst art to theorize about migration or force displacement or return.
CESAR MIGUEL RIVERA VEGA MAGALLON: You know, it's funny because Dillon, actually, I think is the artist. You seem to both of us. I'm sort of just the dilatant who likes to talk about art. And I find myself giving the art talk today. I gave up and I rejected the possibility of art to be revolutionary or these romantic notions of art leading to change. I think because of our historical education and also just meeting artists in Los Angeles, I think nothing will nothing will disincentivize this sort of romantic understanding of art and activism and the imagined potential of art. Like meeting artists in Los Angeles just to say that, right? I gravitate towards art because the camera isn't unfeeling, really unthinking witness. It allows me to space to sort of work through these feelings and inhabit these spaces. And I think when we talk about the restrictions on migrant bodies. I think for some folks I think when they reach a certain level of self-consciousness and self-awareness regarding how surveillance works, I think Dillon’'s work with a Stop LAPD Spying is a great example right of these sort of apparatuses and networks of surveillance that exist through not just look at people who are criminalized but also migrants on the outskirts, who by nature start becoming all residual people and the economy and social structure of contemporary societies. Art offers me that space and that sort of play, but I don't really have an illusion that this is sort of going to generate change either in my personal experience or is going to lead to foundational change and impact outside of my personal bubble, right? I also think I really need to touch on the point that you said, right that ghost appear through stories and through spaces, but ghosts, I think share that with my at least in a Mexican context that I grew up with and that I'm aware of. Ghosts are also chained, right? They're condemned in some cases to haunt these places. To continue seeking answers and to I think in reflection of Indigenous Peoples Day in my opening to this presentation of seeking retribution and justice and answers. And I think art maybe may not be an answer, but it's a stage to ask the question. I think that's how I'm choosing to look at it at this moment in my life.
DILLON SUNG: So yeah, I think ghosts are just as limited by discourse as we are. Yeah, I think I think that. Well, I think that was one of the questions I think I was trying to think through in my essay. Like could I possibly invoke evoke American phenomenon? Like, what does it? Am am I have I been kind of interpolated into American spiritual existence enough for that to even be possible? And I mean it's a bit of a cynical maybe perspective because it's like, oh, like ghosts are like. You know, but similar to how I think of, like affect like there's this like potential of the kind of. The uncaptured ability of you know ghosts affect, but then at the end it feels like. All discourse. It's all thought it's all kind of somewhat contextualized and captured through discourse. And. I think that I mean in terms of art. It's been a while since I've made art objects. So kind of, I don't know if it's like a point of insecurity for me or if I'm OK with it. Not entirely, not entirely sure. But I say that I am engaged primarily in social practice and and through this discussion I'm seeing that.
So I I have I think the Cesar and I both or how I'm understand it have a kind of particular approach to embodied practice. And. Kind of testing the notions and limits of temporality, migrant sociality through putting our bodies through those processes. You know for the reason that Cesar left, you know, similar like kind of similarly the reason I'm I'm staying because my approach to temporality. Is.Is that is to disrupt the notion of a linear telos. A linear teleology, towards progress or arrival. So I'm trying to. For as long as they can not arrive at a particular point and just you know, be here. Because I I know as Cesar was saying, you know, the nostalgia of particular place. I just I. I knew it would be disappointing to to kind of put this or I felt that where I imagined to be. That it would never match up to my imaginary, fantastical expectations. And so I kind of have intentionally, I feel, put myself in somewhat torturous or decided to remain in rather torturous kind of position. That just to really try to test out the the limits of what transgressive, you know, identity or positionality is as an undocumented immigrant, as stateless folks or refugees etcetera, etcetera. Yeah.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you. It sounds like one of the the the themes that continues to come up this time, right? How one lives or is forced to live in and through time. And we just got a question from an audience from David Bang and they write. Do you think the niche cross-section between gender, sexuality, race and immigration status makes it hard for people to understand the experience?
DILLON SUNG: The experience of immigrants?
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: I think so. I'm also going to put. It in the in the chat.
DILLON SUNG: Not sure. I need I I I personally need more context.
CESAR MIGUEL RIVERA VEGA MAGALLON: And I think when we talk about understanding the experience. There's many experiences. I think that's been one of the frustrations with the immigrant rights movement that I've had as a writer and artist is that there is this desire to consolidate all of these various experiences into the experience which doesn't exist. And there's no niche cross section of these factors or these identity markers or these experiences or. I think ways of understanding your life immigration is the result of sexuality, race and gender in many people's lives. And I think it doesn't make it hard to understand people's experience. It gives you the tools to sort of empathize across time and space.
DILLON SUNG: Yeah, I would like to say. Thank you for that anecdote about the kind of. gallows humor that undocui folks have. But I feel I mean. That's what we like live on. So you know it's. Yeah, I I you know, yes, it's it's violent. And it's shitty to. Have to make jokes like that, but it's I found that. Those who laugh at at those jokes like those are. That is the sociality that I'm a part of. Like, that's how I recognize community. Is what I've come to realize because when I I was like. So, you know, back when Trump was elected and everybody was, like, getting married and. So I would see feeds you know on Facebook posts like, you know, people in Los Angeles getting married at City Hall with. Like. Terrible fluorescent lighting and just like horrible. Yeah. And I was just like. This really this. This sucks. Like we don't have the right to good lighting as undocumented immigrants like this is like the worst. Like. I mean, it was just like this worst, like, collective experience that I've witnessed. And, you know, I was like after that election I was like, OK, like. People are freaking out about fascism. I'm just saying, no, this is bad lighting, and the folks who could kind of laugh. At that observation, it felt like they were part of my sociality. Those who felt kind of aghast and like, oh, it's terrible. Like there's this kind of and it's kind of almost unexplainable like wall or kind of barrier between the kind of intimacies that we share. So you know while it is kind of devastating. It's a, It's an interesting. Way I think to recognize each other.
CESAR MIGUEL RIVERA VEGA MAGALLON: And thank you for being up. The lighting. I had planned my wedding when I was 14, right. There was a flower list. There was a authorized and approved list of textiles that could be at the wedding. I got married under a brass Sergeant Van Nuys with like, like (inaudible) or lilies. We made compromises that day. And I do remember the lighting conversation of being a problem. I can't believe getting married with overhead fluorescence. It's just it's very sort of the impossibility of getting what you want when your undocumented.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: I really appreciate how this conversation kind of like went into aesthetics, right? The desire for a different aesthetic or for the right aesthetic. We have a like 2 minutes left, but Cesar had a question came in for you, the question is can Cesar share a bit more and the futility of the return. I'm interested in the disenchantment of her term for self-deported folk.
CESAR MIGUEL RIVERA VEGA MAGALLON: I try to. Be careful with this because I don't want. I don't want to sound like a return or self-deportation is the sort of perpetual state of suffering. I'm just dramatic and Latina, right? I didn't have to be born into it. (inaudible) But something that I've seen in a lot of people's lives is that there's this sense of returning constantly. Right. And I said, and you'll seem like my pseudo-classes. Sort of like imperial that migrants live sort of personal production and antigone in the sense that I really came back to bury my grandparents because I didn't want to be in Los Angeles. Just in California pining to return and deciding in that moment in that trauma, whether I would defy the laws of man to obey the laws of the gods, right. And pay my final respects.
The disenchantment comes from this idea that you come back and the place that you're coming back, you didn't wait for you. Things have changed and your absence has also caused certain effects in the lives of people who you left behind, right? Me leaving as a child had significant most of the consequences for my grandparents. Which I have to deal with now as an adult. Right? And this enchantment of return is sort of in the impossibility of a solution to what has happened to you and has been done to you. That there's no going back, there's no undoing. There's only sort of like a moving forward, and that when you return, it's the realization that there's going to be a lot of work right emotionally, psychologically, spiritually to figuring out what the next step is. And that's the idea that when they'll be deported, when they'll come back and obviously they'll be fine. Is it's a myth tied to the myth of citizenship in the US and belonging in the US. They're very much the same myth.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: I really appreciate this notion of like we're turning is not a solution (laughs) because I think that social movements might frame it that way, right? Of like, oh, if you return, you can be a citizen again. But it's like, well, what, what happened in all of that time?
Let me just check, Oh my goodness. We are literally up on time, but I wanted to see if either of you had any final thoughts you wanted to share, either about what you presented today or about what or for each other.
CESAR MIGUEL RIVERA VEGA MAGALLON: Absolutely. I think Dillon's essay today and. There's a specific moment right where we talk about social death and understanding migrants as experiencing a type of social death similar to what a lot of folks in after pessimist studies are her pessimist traditions. Speak about right, this existential essentialized social depth as being maybe not. In the migrant experience or in the migrant context for non-black Migrants, at least specifically. An inevitability, or the end of the road, or sort of the climax of our sea rising and our ways of producing work and producing writing and theory. I think Dillon’'s essay today for me, showed a sort of like sardonic optimism and sort of a very wry wit of explaining migrant phenomenon, phenomenon and migrant experiences in the world, I think there's nothing that could wrap up that experience better than building a bed and not putting up a guard rail and then falling off a couple months later. I think that's sort of the metaphor that I'll be walking away from that will carry with me for the rest of my life. It's perfect.
DILLON SUNG: Because. I like. I guess what I wanted to say. I haven't spoken to Cesar since I've been in LA. And so I I I think about uour practice sometimes, but you your auto deportation. And how you like? Left us left, I mean temporally too. Like it almost. I don't know. I it almost feels like. We've I've been left in in the past. Or that's how I managed to contextualize it. So I'm kind of excited and curious to see what what more do. Because there's kind of a I know the relationship we have to temporalities. It seems kind of mutually existing, mutually dependent. Almost.
ALAN PELAEZ LOPEZ: Thank you to the two of you. I honestly feel that this has been one of the most generative, artistic and scholarly spaces I’ve been in in long time. Particularly because when it comes to theorizing about undocumented, unauthorized, illegalized communities, there's a lot of studying the subject, and I think that both of you have come to it from a very partly from a speculative framework, but also from an embodied framework that has. I think for me, recent mistakes of how one thinks about being in a body and insisting in being present in the world around you. So thank you for that.
As we come to an end, I want to let everybody else know that our next event, part of this series, is actually in about two weeks. It's on October 28th and it is thinking through undocumented, unauthorized and illegalized migration through draft performance and poetry. So we'll have two artists, you know, exercising their art form in two weeks, Dillon and Cesar you're obviously invited to that as well. But thank you for joining us at the Center for Race and Gender. I hope that for those of you who are here, that it was the generative space. And that you come back to us.