An Offering for the New Mestiza Consciousness

Main Photo subtitle: My Mexican Parents

Jackie Courchene, MFA Student, Dance Studies

In 2020, I began my Dance Studies MFA journey here at Ohio State. I knew that I wanted to somehow focus on reconnecting with my Latinx heritage but given the state of the world during a pandemic, I was not entirely sure where to begin. Dreams of traveling to learn Latinx diasporic forms from the source suddenly felt impossible. I was beginning to feel isolated and unsure of what I was even trying to accomplish.

To ground myself, I began casually creating ofrendas in my home to feel a physical connection to my family. I would collect cacti, flowers, photos, and other objects to arrange in a window. The act of creating this altar, or ofrenda, was not just about honoring family members but conjuring up past seasons of my life and questions around how I have changed. I thought about how isolated I felt at my childhood dance studio with an all-white faculty and grade school, the shame I felt for not speaking Spanish well enough, and the microaggressions I faced whether I was (or wasn’t) being recognized as a Latina in the moment. This ritual of ofrenda building kickstarted the creative practice for my MFA project.

For some context, the practice of building ofrendas comes from the holiday Día de Los Muertos where they are created as a means of honoring family that have transitioned to ancestor. The current state of this practice is an evangelized version of what the Aztecs did pre-conquest to honor their dead and appease the gods of the underworld. While I am Chicana/Mestiza with Spanish, Aztec, and Incan heritage, I was not brought up in a home that celebrated Día de Los Muertos. My Chicana/ Mestiza mother was intent on my brother and I being as white passing as possible: we were fair skinned enough, had white names, and spoke little to no Spanish. This is how my mother planned to keep us safe from discrimination, but no matter how hard she tried, we still ran into our fair share of bigotry in white suburban Texas.

In a Composition class with Professor Crystal Perkins, I began creating movement that was tethered to the objects my ofrenda. The choreography became a conversation between embodied memories as well as the ritual of arranging the objects that held the memories. Whenever I was assigned to bring in choreography, I would rearrange my ofrenda, hold each item, and see what I could deeply connect with to build movement. Eventually this ritual became the structure of my MFA project. Although I was proud of the work I was making, I began asking myself: am I allowed to be creating ofrendas when this was not part of my cultural practice growing up? Am I inflicting more harm by engaging with this practice? While juggling these questions around ethics, I began a collaborative process with undergraduate dancers. We focus on sharing stories and experiences within Latinidad, and I introduced them to my ofrenda building practice. One of the biggest shifts in this ritual practice was coming to realize the homogenized term that is “Latinidad”. It is a huge politically charged and exonymic term that encompasses so many people with vastly different experiences, hair colors and textures, skin tones, languages, and nationalities. While vastly different, we have collectively survived the colonization, displacement, and genocide caused by the Spanish conquest. While so much has changed and been forgotten, we are still here with glimmers of our cultural practices, languages, dances, and histories even if they have been adapted to the world that we currently live in. By building ofrendas with my cast of dancers, I am coming to realize that it is more about the choice to celebrate the resilience of my Chicanx/Mestizo ancestors and my Latinx community. I know it is not the same ritual practice of my ancestors 600 years ago, or even of my ancestors 150 years ago, but my current embodied iteration is still about them and for them. It is a representation of how we have defied the odds to adapt and how we build community in our commonalities. I have never felt prouder of the hybrid space that I exist in and the radical act of resilience that is my family. It is within our nature to adapt and survive, and I have come to believe that this practice in building ofrendas is emblematic of that.

Building the ofrenda

Choreography in practice