Buscando nuevos caminos [videorecording] = Looking for new paths

Summary: FOMMA - Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya - is a collective of Mayan women who use theater as a tool for education and community building. Based in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, they are performers, playwrights, and teachers who tour their work in their communities and internationally, performing plays that focus on women's and indigenous rights, literacy, cultural survival, ecology, health, and education in the Tzeltal and Tzotzil indigenous languages. ‘Buscando nuevos caminos’ (‘Looking for New Paths’) is a play about about the false promises that impulse indigenous men and women to find new opportunities in the United States. The forced separation due to migration leaves women by themselves, in a society where they have to learn to survive the violence and greed of unscrupulous relatives. When three young women decide to go to the North and cross the border to find their parents, they have to suffer the abuse of the ‘coyote’ and the difficult conditions of the desert. Trying to escape from the dangers in the border, families get separated, as many fractured families due to migration and violence. The women of FOMMA offer strong monologues about the desire of crossing the border – they measure the reasons to leave, but most importantly, the reasons to stay in Chiapas. They end the play with a firm ‘I’m going to live here, and I’m going to die here’ calling their brothers and sisters to come back home and look for new paths in their own land. Q&A with the members of FOMMA follow this performance’s video documentation.

Credits: Isabel Juárez Espinoza, Victoria Patishtan Gómez, María Francisca Oseguera Cruz, Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, Floriberta Pérez Ruiz, María Pérez Santiz, performers.