TRÁNSITO / Root Mound
This project, spanning more than a decade, has been a journey of self-discovery for me, a journey to find my place in the world as an adult and a cuir / queer artist, following the loss of my father, Tránsito—who lends his name to the project—originally from Chiapa de Corzo.
From this place of grief, I reflect, drawing on personal memory, historical material, and archival sources, on the colonial obsession with controlling Indigenous spirituality and sexuality within the worldview of the Chiapanec people, as also occurred in other Indigenous communities of Abya Yala (the Americas). This reflection is articulated through the figure of the Chuntá, a ritual inversion that transcends the gender binary imposed by the conquest, allowing me to position myself as a dancer dressed as a woman within this symbolic and patriarchal territory.
This ritual becomes an act of reconnection with my Zoque-Chiapanec lineage. A process of shedding the masculine imposition and my internal colonialism, through a return to memory and the possibility of rebirth, to integrate my alternative Indigenous subjectivity into the gender and sexual diversity that inhabits the celebration of the Fiesta Grande de San Sebastián.
TRÁNSITO is a counter-narrative and an initiatory act at a liminal moment of maturity as the author of a challenging and liberating experience, linked to my cuir identity as well as my Indigenous heritage, in the face of the shame and ladinization that led my ancestors to hide their origins due to racism. This process is sustained now in a journey of self-affirmation that finds its greatest value in the transition between photography and words, becoming an offering and a rite of transformation: a rewriting of the ancestral wound that imagines Indigenous cuir / queer futures.
Studio photos: © Studio Lin/ © Roberto Tondopó
Includes an author's archive fanzine detail, a signed book, and a dust jacket band for its edition available only in Mexico.