Theatre Journal

Abstracts:

This essay is an examination of the llanto (wail) as political performance praxis through documenting and reflecting on the collective work of Cherríe Moraga, Celia Herrera Rodríguez and approximately twenty-five artists to stage a PerformaProtesta," Un llanto colectivo, at San Diego immigrant detention centers following the separation of migrant families during the summer of 2018. As such, it looks to the llanto—here collectivity produced—as a powerful act of refusal that, in addition to asserting dissent and iterating a contestation of centuries of sedimented violence, hollows out and routes time-bending pathways to ancestral alter-knowledges. The essay examines this "llanto space" as an alternative to the politics of recognition and representation, and the different ways via which it instantiates a refusal of these modalities. Furthermore, it reflects on the history of affect-generating crying through professional criers and the figure of La Llorona as inspirations for the 2018 PerformaProtesta; it also engages with transnational feminist movements that activate collective wails and screams to demand an end to gendered violence. The essay then turns to a close-reading of the three day event, reflecting on the unique politics of the llanto in relation to the other narrative and theatrical elements of the performance.