Réquiem para un alcaraván

Lukas Avendaño is a muxe. A muxe can be defined as a man from an Indigenous community in the Tehuantepec Isthmus region of Oaxaca, Mexico, who takes on traditional female roles: affective, emotional, and sexual. From this place comes the Mexican artist Lukas Avendaño, who, in the performance Réquiem para un alcaraván, represents (and represents himself within) muxe rituals as a manifesto of vindication and celebration of that community.

Dressed as a bride in a white petticoat, white veil, and holding a bouquet of flowers, Avendaño opens the work by recreating the ritual of a wedding and its celebration. Changing costumes throughout the performance, he calls for a feast in honour of the Virgin, dances, and tells his own story through an autobiographical and political monologue.

In Réquiem para un alcaraván, says Antonio Prieto Stambaugh, “his androgynous corporeality challenges the spectator to confront their own prejudices and stereotypes of the other: homosexual and Indigenous.”

Avendaño was born in 1977 in Oaxaca, where he grew up in conditions of infrastructural poverty, without drinking water or electricity. He studied anthropology at university, and during that time began creating performances while training as a choreographer. In his artistic exploration, he turned his reflection towards the culture of his place of origin, focusing on the identity and cultural legacy of musical traditions, dance, belief systems, and rituals, which he has woven into his performances alongside artistic elements from other parts of the world.

According to theatre researcher Prieto Stambaugh, in 2012 he became the only Mexican performer to address, through his work, the “explosive confluence of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity” when he presented Réquiem para un alcaraván.

In Lukas Avendaño’s vindication of the muxe Indigenous community, there is a call to return to Mesoamerican roots in the face, as the artist sees it, of the failure of patriarchy and Catholicism.