Native American Voguing

Native American Voguing

By P. Dante Cuauhtémoc, M.F.A.

Critical Dance Studies Doctoral Program at the University of California at Riverside

My research focuses on how Native Americans of the Western Hemisphere have deployed the dance form of vogue (voguing) as a method of decolonization, anti-colonialism, and resilience. Though the dance form of vogue was founded and stewarded by Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Black and Latinx communities, I have observed Native Americans using the form to create their own kinships, as well as form political-artistic alliances with other queer peoples of color.

My project will be to examine how queer Indigenous peoples, often self-called Two-Spirit (2S, 2spirit) people, have created their own families, kinship networks, and ceremonies (often due to being ostracized from their tribal communities, because of their sexual orientation or identity). Though in the past, some tribes revered 2spirit people, the project of British and Spanish imperial colonialism’s “heteronormative patriarchy” destroyed this cultural value for some tribes –which in turn has led to the extreme general mistreatment of LGBTQ2S peoples. Seeking family, and ways to offer their love, talents, and life, some Two-Spirit peoples have entered the spheres of “Imperial Drag Councils” (private societies in charge of drag balls and gay neighborhood cultural affairs), created “Two-Spirit Powwows”, and participated in “The Ballroom Scene” (where voguing is stewarded).

Today, throughout the Western Hemisphere, Native American 2spirit people vogue to celebrate and openly proclaim both their queerness and the indigenous ancestry, while simultaneously protesting imperial heteronormative patriarchy. This work is significant, because, to date, there are less than fifteen academic works that address voguing, and there are less than two articles that look at this culture and its ideologies from the lens of Indigenous studies. Little work on Indigenous dance directly address its efforts and struggle of queer coalition of color community building. Thus, this project’s contribution is to the expansion of the work of these fields of Native American Studies, Queer/Trans/LGBTQ+ Studies, and Dance Studies, by challenging, though synthesis, the borders of these fields of study that have been previously been established as discrete. In this unique way, I build on the generous and growing trend to recognize and remember the work of 2spirit people in sustaining the resilience of both their Indigenous communities, and the broader LGBTQ2S communities.   

To you my mountain

To you my mountain 
P. Dante Cuauhtémoc, M.F.A.
(Winter 2016) 

I am the wind.
Hail and ice.
Water and daggers of obsidian. 
I speak my mind, and cut with shade.
I bless the earth with my wet dance, and flowers to bloom.
Healing mist of a morning due.
Deathly hollow screams in the night.
Cool breeze on a sunny day.
And there you stand, mountain.
The one who does not fear or tremble or bend to my push.
Unyielding in your admiration of my chest and thrust.
You see me.
You smile.
And you stand there.
Unshaken.
Absorbing my dew.
In your valleys I rest my head.
Hugged by your minerals and metals.
Enriched is the soil of our love.
Beautiful is the sunset against the clouds of our heaven.

I vogue in the rain

Today I vogued in the rain

without a jacket or 'brella

without caution or wind

I danced in you Tlaloc

like any tlaloque

ometlaloque

faggot of the water

dew of the air.

I vogued for you

my family of the sea

ocean falling upon my face

a splash

a bust

a trickle of what I know is not a trick

but a memory

on monday

of my past when I as a little boy would bask in your radiance and create a dance for you to heal the earth mother from all the poison of oil and plastics that lay upon her flesh and in my bones.

I vogued in the rain today

Butch Queen Performance

Hands Performance

Butch Queen Vogue Like a Femme Queen Performance

and sum other stumble between al'that.

I cried today

thinking of those without my medicine

without water or food, medicine, that keep them alive

every 15 minutes hearing

Acquired immune deficiency is homicide

Acquired immune deficiency is homicide

Acquired immune deficiency is homicide.

Let Us Praise the Masters of Slow Death

I vogued for you

in the rain

wet

moist

sad

soaked

Submerged.

In times of great sadness

it is only a blessing

to feel the tears of the eyes much bigger than my own

in a time of sickness

without compassion

I float in my wet body

I feel the water pass through skin

the drops

hit me

like the dew of sunlight

the the warmth of brown sugar

in forever condensation of sacred love

post love making.

I vogue for you

a cry

in the larger cry

in the larger Tlaloc

a blessing to the thirsty earth.

I walked for you

in performance in the rain

I walked for me

in a fierce bag and beat boots

I walked for us

a vogue to remember

that the cry is a release to feel the thirst of emotion that has been denied to us too long in this world of suffering and invalid segregation.

#BrownSugaTii

November 27th, 2017-- Blessings

It is another Monday, and I have have been very angry and overly confused at the fact that I have so much to do, and I am pretty sure it is impossible for me to do all the things that I need to do.. this comes from multiple levels of abuse coming my way, and and lack of support, due to graduate school, and myself, coming from a limited resource family. But more, I find myself wondering, and wondering, where should I go? What should I do? Why am I not having fun like other gays my age... I see so many of my friends having fun on weekends, while I continue to work, thinking that it is fun-relaxing research, but indeed, it is work beyond work beyond work. Many times I want to be something else, like a cute little guy that richer bigger guys take care of..... but that leads to levels of slavery and lost of personhood I cannot stand.
And so what?
I have learned that I yearn for that which I do not have. and because of that, I cannot have anything. More I am in bad mood, because I started in a place of loss, negativity, and desolation. And so, instead of that, I will focus on what makes me great, and happy.

I am so thankful that I have so many friends around the world. More I am so happy to be a part of the House of Lauren. They have been more than generous with their support of my research, and I am so happy that they love me and my work enough to support my continuance with it. I am thankful that I have a good chair and good advisors that try hard to support me. And I am thankful that I can reflect and express. At the end of the day, I love expressing myself, I love feeling myself, and I love being catalytic.

Perhaps that is who I am,
Cuauhtémoc Peranda
Father Dante Ome'Lauren
The Poet, Scholar, Dancer, Educator
The Glitter Shaman
The Catalysis

and I am thankful that I can redefine myself everyday!

Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Happy Birthday, I love you

“The vision of radical Third World Feminism necessitates our willingness to work with those people who would feel at home in El Mundo Zurdo, the left-handed world: the colored, the queer, the poor, the female, the physically challenged. From our blood and spirit connections with these groups, we women on the bottom throughout the world can form an international feminism. For separatism by race, nation, or gender will not do the trick of revolution. Autonomy, however, is not separatism. We recognize the right and necessity of colonized peoples throughout the world, including Third World women in the U.S., forming independent movements toward self-government. But ultimately, we must struggle together. Together we form a vision which spans from the self-love of our colored skins, to the respect of our foremothers who kept the embers of revolution burning, to our reverence for the trees – the final reminder of our rightful place on this planet. The change evoked on these pages is material as well as psychic. Change requires a lot of heat. It requires both the alchemist and the welder, the magician and the laborer, the witch and the warrior, the myth-smasher and the myth-maker. Hand in Hand, we brew and forge a revolution.”

 

--Gloria E. Anzaldúa, El Mundo Zurdo: The Vision

But is that a real story?

Cuauhtémoc: I'm really interested in 'what is a story? And, what qualifies a story, or storytelling, to be truth, or understood as history?'

The Glitter Shaman: Bitch! Even creation stories have creation stories!

Grandma Azúcar: I think what the Shaman was expressing, was the frustration we students have been having with "the school." Mi hij@z think truth es qué something we have not fabricated--but all receipts are recorded, made, reproduced, and stored, through some pinche flawed human methodologies. And, they always require careful translation and transcription in order to be shared. See mijo, I think your task isn't about truth at all, but a praxis of navigating dancing storytelling to produce transcriptions that are meaningful to those who are in need of that navigated knowledge, but do not have resources, honors, and credentials necessary to access the resources you so easily browse... También, be careful of your privileges mija...

The Glitter Shaman: Facts and alternative facts (lies), are all discourse, and are all chisme--and it all is glitter! It is important to acknowledge the creative bias that exists in all creation, but it is also gloriously necessary that you honor the differentiations and disidentifications in glitter.

Cuauhtémoc: Its like what a daughter of the Kiki House of Mona Lisa affirmed with me at the ball, "realness is first, everything starts with realness."

Sweaty Hugs are Necessary in Extreme Heat

It was quite chilly last night. And today, I awoke refreshed! More, I seem to have regained much of the clairvoyance I had lost to confusion, and thus lamented all through the weekend for its return. It is something, a heavy something, to know that heat affect me so much. And, it's not an issue of having A/C, but more an issue of needing to be outdoors, and do work, without dripping into the hungry earth, or the sensitive laptop. The heat seems to compound anxieties, forcing fragility in action, leading to inaction, frustration, and morose contemplation. Such a process, so dire and deep, is hard to escape. Yet, somehow, acceptance of the grossness of it all, is how I made it through my time in a 2009 Northwestern Summer; and with the wisdom of contact improv (in all its sharing of sweat), I have found hugs to be the medicine I need to jolt me back from linear destruction. Of course, cool weather, mist, and Karl the Fog, always seem to do the trick as well.
#PhDLife