boca errante/wandering mouth is a ritual-performance that weaves together the story of the L.A. River, the Pacific Lamprey-an ancient fish that used to spawn and thrive in the river before its concretization-La Malinche, the enslaved Nahua woman, whose job was that of an interpreter for the Spanish conqueror Cortés during the colonization process in what is now called México, and blue elderberry, a powerful medicinal and purgative native plant. The Pacific lamprey becomes a poignant metaphor for the mistreatment it has endured, drawing parallels with the oppression of women in México. The lamprey's unique jawless toothed mouth, attaches to host fish for sustenance, and echoes the complex narrative of La Malinche, whose polyglot mouth and sharp tongue led her to be considered the nations whore and traitor. Like the Lamprey and La Malinche, the L.A. River’s unwillingness to have a steady mouth resulted in her concretization by the U.S. Army Corp of Engineer. There is perpetual patriarchal desire of control over wandering mouths. boca errante/wandering mouth invites the audience to reflect on what Stacy Alaimo* calls our transcorporeality, “the contact zone between human and more-than-human nature”, and to insist that bodies are never fully autonomous, but always implicated. The performance unfolds as a poetic exploration of intraaction, where each participant plays a role in helping the Lamprey spawn into the river from the 4th street bridge.

The ritual-garment is made with defective cotton fabric recuperated from a sweat shop in L.A.’s fashion district dyed with blue elderberry harvested from the L.A. River shore and L.A.’s river water, 2023. Photography by Pistor Orendain.

*Alaimo, S. (2010), Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Installation view of ritual-garment