Jenny Wu, MFA
MA Candidate, Art History and Archaeology, WUSTL
Jenny Wu is a graduate student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis, where she previously received an MFA in creative writing. Her work appears or is forthcoming in BOMB Magazine, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, and Asymptote Journal.
Feet, Hands, and Tongues: Reading Cristina Rivera Garza in Oct. 2020
Rivera Garza’s latest collection of essays, Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country, translated by Sarah Booker and published by Feminist Press on October 6, 2020, grapples with the U.S. and Mexico’s long history of violent erasure and with those hauntings and traces that persist in the pain of memory. The figures who haunt the book include a young woman who writes letters to the Mexican government from her hospital bed, a mother of two teenage boys killed at a party in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, and Rivera Garza’s own sister, who was a victim of femicide in 1990. Even when Rivera Garza’s reportages turn away from the personal to focus explicitly on the war on drugs, on the clay statues that comprise Alejandro Santiago’s 2501 Migrants, or on the COVID-19 pandemic, the stories—the specters—of those whose lives have been devastated by the neoliberal state are never out of arm’s reach.
Encountering Cristina Rivera Garza: Then and Now
I was first introduced to the work of Rivera Garza in 2018, when the award-winning small press Dorothy: a publishing project, based here at Wash U, published Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana’s translation of The Taiga Syndrome. At the time, I was not yet an MA student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology but rather working on an MFA in fiction writing under the founder of the press, Danielle Dutton, and Rivera Garza had not yet received the MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ that she would be awarded in October 2020. While the ongoing humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border perpetuated by U.S. government was already an issue at the forefront of our consciousness back in 2018, we also had no inkling, back then, of the COVID-19 pandemic that would come to take more than one million lives worldwide.
As such, two of Rivera Garza’s essays in particular called to me in light of the upcoming installation of Hostile Terrain 94 at Wash U. The essays, entitled “On 2501 Migrants by Alejandro Santiago” and “Touching is a Verb: The Hands of the Pandemic and Its Inescapable Questions,” were first published in 2011 and 2020, respectively. The spirit of these essays is one of generosity reminiscent of the protagonist in Yuri Herrera’s fictional book Signs Preceding the End of the World, who proclaims, “You are the door, not the one who walks through it.”
“You Simply Need to Examine the Feet”
In the first of the two essays, Rivera Garza hands the story over to the artist Alejandro Santiago and the thirty-two members of his workshop. In lush ekphrastic passages, Rivera Garza describes her visit to the artist’s workshop in Santiago Suchilquitongo, near Oaxaca, coming face to face with the 2,501 clay statues, “strangely lifelike beings that, at any moment—preferably between sips of mezcal—could begin telling you their stories about crossing the border.”
The number, 2,501, was intentional: twenty-five hundred people died trying to cross the US-Mexico border until the year Santiago himself crossed over. “Each of Alejandro Santiago’s clay migrants carries a signature,” Garza writes. “You can see it on each statue’s foot. […] Each signature—a curved line that extends to the ankle, a symmetrical fissure between the toes, or the faint impression of a nail—is a marker of the artist’s identity. […] To confirm the artist’s identity, you simply need to examine the feet.”
The significance of the feet as markers of identity cannot be overstated, as feet not only walk, run, chase, flee, and dance but also leave traces on the land where the absence of a person is keenly felt. The feet are, finally, where toe tags are placed, or unable to be placed, in the case of those whose bodies are lost in the process of crossing. As is the case with Hostile Terrain 94, the identity of the migrant becomes a community effort to uncover—and to imagine, if need be—so as to collectively mourn. Since the time Alejandro Santiago began work on 2501 Migrants in 2000, the number of migrant deaths has risen from twenty-five hundred to thirty-two hundred, which is the number of toe tags HT94 plans to produce.
“An Intimately Political Task”
In “Touching is a Verb,” written in the early months of the U.S.’s COVID-19 lockdown, Rivera Garza asks a very bare and basic question, one we ask nowadays when we touch a piece of fruit at the supermarket or a package that’s come in the mail: “Who else has touched this object that I am touching?” She then compares our attempts to trace how commodities have moved from farms and factories to stores to our homes, to Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s investigation of the origins of the matsutake fungus in The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton University Press, 2015), which uncovers, as one would imagine, a long chain of hands.
“Those of migrant workers,” Rivera Garza enumerates, “those of businessmen, those of forest rangers, those of police, those of immigration agents. Calloused hands and soft hands.” Our attempts to protect ourselves and others from the virus, Rivera Garza argues, have led to a rematerialization of our worlds, to an increased awareness of hands. “To trace the labor of hands,” she writes, “in the processes of production and reproduction in our world—this is an intimately political task.”
It is not difficult to realize, then, that by re-inscribing the names of migrants who died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert, the hands of participants in HT94 are also engaged in an intimately political task, a task whose stakes seem higher than ever in the devastating political and ecological climate of 2020. Like the specters in Rivera Garza’s essay collection, thirty-two hundred migrants’ lives will be reconstituted through multiple re-inscriptions, multiple re-tellings, that are as fragmentary and incomplete as they will be persistent.
“Tongue to Tongue”
When Rivera Garza visited Wash U in 2019 as part of a conference entitled “Crossing the Borders of Creation and Critique,” she described the act of translation succinctly and seductively, using the phrase “tongue to tongue.” She was speaking of translation in the literal sense, commenting on the experience of having her work translated from Spanish to English, but the task of translation operates on a metaphorical level as well.
When a writer publishes an essay, they are attempting to translate a subjective experience or a set of data into a meaning that resonates with the reader. When an artist oversees the creation of twenty-five hundred clay statues or thirty-two hundred toe tags, they are attempting to translate loss into a visible, tangible medium. Likewise, when the specters of history speak, they do so in another’s tongue.