Visual Essays
Repatriation Lima-Mexico City
Flight 3527
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On April 22, I was repatriated to Mexico in the eleventh flight the Mexican embassy sent from Peru. The mere idea of returning to my country in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic was already shocking, but returning on a military plane with people loaded with suitcases and stories of frustrated trips, dreams postponed, perhaps broken, doubled the impact. We were more than 100 Mexicans waiting at the embassy in Lima, where I got to know the story of two young students, an engineer, and baby Noah´s family odisseey from Cusco. Paperwork, trucks filled with foreigners, plus the lonely streets of Lima, and 7 hours later, home.
(Peru-Mexico, 2020).
Santa Rosa of Lima​
A religious celebration
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Santa Rosa of Lima's festivity is due every 30th of august in Peru, one of the most important religiuos pilgrimages that gathers the fiathful and the curious to Lima's downtown.
"Lord, increase my suffering and your love too".
Santa Rosa of Lima, defender of the poor and illed. Her real name was Isabel, and she was not a nun, she actually did domestic labour and later became part of the Santo Domingo order. Music and dance are part of her celebration, filling the Peruvian streets with colors and sounds, while some write down letters asking her for special favours, which then are thrown to a well at Santa Rosa's convent. This way, during the celebration, music and belief join in pilgrimage with the image of their beloved Rosa.
(Lima, Peru, 2019).
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About womanhood
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Women are told since childhood how to dress, how to behave and speak. We are constantly bombarded by a mixed media that ensures womanhood as a precious value, but also, as flesh product. Nevertheless, being a woman constitutes more than attitude or a pose, it goes beyond a beauty formula or genre performances.
These portraits are a representation of how it feels, -sometimes-, to be a woman, of how toxic certain social norms that define femineity can be. To strike a pose does not mean you are a woman, nor to defy beauty standards; rather, a woman is an essence that becomes stronger over time and self-acceptance of our type of inner and outer beauty.
Mizz Xuxu: The idyll of being "brujer"
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The drag universe is complex and multifaceted.
Beyond makeup, drama and the personification of a feminine self, there are mysteries that bewitch the eye that beholds. Capable of transforming the simple into ethereal, concepts get reversed, disrupted. "Brujer" is the symbiosis of a woman and a witch, it is a metamorphosis, the cosmic spell that materialize femininity upon any body, without prejudices or utopias.
This is an invitation to the kaleidoscopic universe of drags, the new beautiful.
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