Between 2010 and 2015, I spent a significant amount of time in Chiapas, El Salvador, and in and between the southern geographies of Mexico and the Northern Isthmus. I traveled with two other Salvadoran femme companions, Polo and Pan, and in other moments with collectives of artists, lovers, my chihuahua, and alone. These travels were guided by a folk-punk ethic of train hopping and vaga(bonding), where I opened myself to the visual and sonic realities of the people and places we were in relation with and systemically uprooted from. Traveling and living in this way was not new to us as three Salvi women. We were young mestiza women pushed out of higher education and still hungry for knowledge.
The principles and ethics of mutual aid, sharing economies and grassroots community-building were important to us. Allowing ourselves to be guided by these principles, alongside our often very bare conditions of survival, exposed us to moments of deep vulnerability and even danger. At the same time, they opened us to ways of understanding vulnerability I relationship with communities in resistance. This was an intimate vulnerability, one rooted in trust, good and free will, and most importantly, reciprocity.
We traveled however we could—by bus, furgones or trailers, walking, hitching, and sometimes by plane if we had enough money to get back. I snapped pictures of all I was seeing, listening to, and ultimately feeling-sensing, unknowingly building a repository of knowledge that the decolonial scholar Macarena Gomes-Barris might call a “futurist archive.” Years later it would come to be Caminxs del Sur, a sonic ode to our travels through the Isthmus.
Sonic- Collag(ing)
I made my way through many towns in the jungles of the Mexican southeast, the peninsula, the Gulf of Mexico and Totonac land, the Peten region, into the Mayan highlands, and further south or sur to my own family’s complexed ancestral lands, abajo del Río Lempa. I snapped photos of what I felt was beautiful, ironic, intriguing, haunting—anything that seemed or sounded familiar but that I had never seen in my California upbringing. I learned to collage as a teen and would play with magazine and newspaper clippings and stamp images to create flyers for our local Critical Mass, a monthly bike gathering for folks looking for an alternative space. DIY collage taught me the beauty of chance, and how by reconstructing an image one has the capacity to build and reimagine the world as they see-feel-sense and hear it. “Caminxs del Sur” was created alongside my thought-partners Nancy Escalante and Ana K. Pano, and the people featured in this sonic-collage are folks we (Polo and Pan) walked with and many others we haven’t met at all, all connected through similar processes of embodied knowledge of empire and the visual, sonic, and geographical landscapes we sensed in the Isthmus. Some of the images featured were located through archival research conducted by Nancy.
When layered with an aural and audio atmosphere, this process of collaging and (re)imaging becomes what is known as the sonic-collage. The living sensorium that emerges—rooted in grounded forms of community-building outside of the constraints and confines of an institution—is what we as a collective of travelers and creators attempted to make visible and audible through an audio-visual experience. The collage’s vivid neon colors evoke a femme urgency that I felt throughout our travels—an urgency defined by the entanglements of compassion and rage that are tied to land, people, and life in the isthmus. Similarly, my love for high-paced beats-per-minute (BPM) ancestral and house music pulses through this ode. The femme urgency and sensual rhythms of discos daughters—techno and house—resonate alongside deep bass and ancestral lamenting chants that echo throughout the sonic-collage.
As three artists scattered across Cali, we wanted the complexities of our positions, experiences, and raced, gendered, and classed realities to be reflected in the sonic-collage. We also hoped that the remixed visual and sonic testimonies offered through this medium might contain within them the capacity to envision, guide, and reorient (us) as historically negated peoples of Central America towards a transformative horizon of seeing, feeling, and listening to the Central American pluriverse. As we constructed this sonic-collage, we asked ourselves: What is the story and emotion we would like to tell? And so we began by honoring the land and its people—those that continue to defy settler-colonial destruction. The first song is an ancestral chant sung by an Embera woman to the children of her community. Titled “Costa Pacífica de Waunana,” it is sung for its curative properties. We layered and strategically cut and placed images with the music in hopes of conveying the long and historical indebtedness to pueblos originarios whose lands we walked and fed from, including those in our own lineages of ancestry.
The voices heard and captured through voice recordings belong to Afro and Indigenous land defenders and migrants we met across the routes of the displaced. The first voice is that of Nahuat land defender Margot López of Izalco, El Salvador, recorded in Los Angeles in 2019 alongside Esther Hernandez. “Nuestras luchas en los territorios,” López declares, “our struggles in our territores.” The visual archives spans over 10 years of digital and communal documentation. Among these images are Mirna Sauzo (4:54), a Garifuna community leader who was targeted and assassinated for her community work in September 2019, and Sergio Rojas Ortiz (1:34), a Bribri Indigenous leader and land defender of so-called Costa Rica, who was also assassinated in that same year.
The voice and poetry of Afro-Gari-Lenca author and lesbo-feminist Melissa Cardoza can be heard alongside the music of Honduran feminist artist and song-writer Karla Lara (3:37). Cardoza recites her poem “Berta de las Aguas,” a homage to the Lenca militant and anti-imperialist activist Berta Cáceres, stating “no saben de esta venganza nuestra, de ser libres y nunca cambiar la rebeldia por nada” (they don’t know about this revenge of ours, to be free and never change rebellion for anything). Cardoza’s potent words against colonialism and for her friend, also brutally assassinated, are a testament to the longstanding matrilineal solidarities that endure across Indigeneities, Blackness, and rural, dispossessed, and mixed-raced communities. We offer these reworked sounds for the isthmus, for the people of the isthmus that have longed and adamantly created their own worlds of abundant existence in spite of settler-colonial, neoliberal, and fascist collapse.
The Pluriverse
In Chiapas, I experienced my first encounters with what I would come to know as the “pluriverse.” Zapatista communities describe the pluriverse as “a world where so many worlds fit,” a cosmology rooted in dismantling all forms of supremacy. I found myself sitting in a community-organized assembly with Indigenous members from across Mexico and a Colombian researcher who was facilitating the conversation. The discussion was centered on migrants in Mexico—although at first, I didn’t realize she was referring to migrants from Central America. I remember the way my heart dropped when I heard her say “centroamericanos.” I had never really heard anyone use this term in the region, and less so in Fresno where I grew up. The pluriverse became visible and audible to me in that moment—when we “centroamericanos” were named, heard through voice, and allowed to exist among other marginalized and resistant peoples—where our worlds were present and fitting together in those many worlds.
Chiapas draws scholars and activists from across the globe to learn about Zapatista models of autonomy, self-determination, interdependence, non-leaders, and non-hierarchy. At the time, I didn’t question my position much and also didn’t consider myself a tourist due to my mixed identity as someone with a passport who also experienced economic and educational precarity. Our positions as three daughters of displaced Central Americans left me with many questions about my own place in these historical and ancestral sites of knowledge. I was not a researcher, I did not approach these spaces as a middle-class earner, and most importantly, my motivations for being in the isthmus were driven by my desire to know my own family’s ancestral lineages and the ever-present realities of displacement across the region. And so we lived, walked, and bore witness to the very conditions that uprooted our families—forces that continue to displace marginalized working-poor people. And within these migratory spaces, we confronted the complex realities of mixed-race identities on Indigenous lands, along with the tensions and nuances that such encounters carry.
Tzotzil and Tzeltal community members were the first to invite us to a coffee, a rabbit mole stew, and the sincerity of conviviality—a mutual exchange of worlds and paradigms. This hospitality did not erase the need for caution towards outsiders, so we were obligated to explain who we were and our families’ long and arduous histories in these very lands. In doing so, it became apparent that our stories, struggles, and contemporary realities were intrinsically intertwined. Maya and Indigenous communities throughout the Mexican Southeast have long witnessed, and often stood in solidarity with, displaced Central Americans as well as precarious traveling-working Central Americans, including other Maya who have crossed these border zones for decades and even centuries. In this sense, I think of Afro and Indigenous communities across Central America that have shared historical contact and ancestral knowledge systems through these particular geographies—isthmian spaces marked by migration, resistance, and relationality.
“Aquí también usamos el cabal!”
In another encounter I found myself alone in Ocosingo, Chiapas in 2013. A protest had erupted in the mercado central. I stood at the edge of an indoor mercado and watched as Indigenous campesinos mobilized against an agrarian policy threatened by then- president Enrique Pena Nieto. I pulled out my small digital camera and took a few photographs. Almost immediately, an older man with a sombrero approached me. “Compañera! No se quede allí nomás tomando fotos, únase a la lucha!” (Compañera! Don’t just stand there taking photos, join the struggle!) he said. His words struck me acutely and I knew he was right. I had already witnessed too many white, privileged tourists visually exploit and attempt to “capture” the precarious conditions of Indigenous and campesino people in Mexico and Central America. I put my camera away and began marching with the crowd. I will always cherish that moment, like so many others, that pushed me to rethink the struggles that define people’s lives—the threats they face and the urgent need to ask where, within the pluriversal map of earthly survival, one stands to resist.
Ocosingo, like many small rural communities in Chiapas, is also the isthmus. It was considered part of the Guatemalan Kingdom during the colonial era, and trade routes between autonomous Indigenous people and city-states have crisscrossed the region for millennia. I came to learn this very directly through people’s vocabulary on the streets, where Mayan languages are interspersed with some Spanish. “Aquí también usamos el cabal!”(“here, we also use the cabal”) someone told me, cabal being a word commonly used in the isthmus to mean “precisely.” And it was true. Just a combi ride away, one seamlessly crosses the terrain of nationally imposed borders and the struggles faced by campesinos in Ocosingo continue: privatization, displacement, and the fracturing of communal land. These processes are paramount and parallel to the struggles for land and life throughout Central America.
Guests Of and In Little Central America
I was born in the littlest of “Little Central America”—Los Angeles, California, also known as “Elay” for its Spanglish pronunciation. I was raised in the lesser-known city of Fresno in the Central Valley. Fresno is known as the crossroads of prison alley, where the majority of California’s state and federal prisons exist alongside industrial agricultural geographies. This is where most of the country’s fruits, vegetables, and meats are mass produced, picked, packaged, and distributed. I know campo and the people of the campo, these are the places my family is from. So I think of Little Central America in this way—an extension of the urbanity of Los Angeles that stretches itself across the land and remakes little Central Americas across geographies where our people are divided, interspersed, and often live as guests and settlers on colonially dispossessed and manufactured lands. Chiapas is one of these places, like Fresno and many cities in Elay.
It was deeper in the jungles of Chiapas, in Palenque, that I would meet a Honduran man displaced from his home. I had arrived as night fell and carved out a small sleeping spot beside a storefront for safety. That night, the young man approached me gently to ask for help. He was selling lollipops and said he was “stuck” in Palenque because he had broken his ankle and foot on a jump from “La Bestia,” the freight train that runs through town. Mexican immigration officials are notorious for extorting and targeting migrants here, detaining them for long periods before deportation. We spoke briefly, both of us in states of shock and unease. We exchanged some words of alivio: that he would be able to sell enough to buy a bus ticket to the next town, and that I would be okay sleeping exposed on the street that night. The companionship was comforting, if only for a moment in time.
The ephemerality of mobility, and of those we meet along the way, is in some ways more lasting than the ephemera of a photograph or archive. A photograph, whether physical or digital, can be lost, damaged, or disappear. But the relationships formed in movement—through travel, through life—are fleeting glimpses into each other’s worlds. This is life showing itself. To allow oneself a moment of connection amid shared fear is another way of stepping into the pluriverse. He, a displaced and injured Honduran man. Me, a hungry artist romanced by liberation. And we said hello.
Kolaval
My experiences in southern Chiapas and parts of the isthmus propelled this sonic experiment and offered another way to understand ourselves in relation to this land. Here, histories of migration, violence, world-building, and knowledge intersect. As working-poor, non-degreed people, it was not difficult to locate and articulate our own realities among peoples and artisans also impacted by the onslaught of global neoliberalism. It was they who gave us the courage and the language to create, to articulate with our hands and minds what we were sensing-seeing-feeling.
I am eternally grateful for the many nights, mornings, sunrises, and sunsets that I spent holding my breath in a coordinated trance atop mountains, dancing in joyful abandon across the landscapes once crossed in fear and pain by my mother, my father, and nearly my entire family. I danced those sacred lands and places with my sisters, often crying while we moved, because of the enormity of what it meant for us. And we sensed that.
Kolaval, thank you.
Paula S. Ayala is a Central American artist born in Los Angeles and raised in California’s Central Valley. Her artistic and professional practices weave together communitarian and land-based knowledge(s) manifested in the arts. She is currently a PhD student in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA.