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“The One Who Hung Herself”

by Kara Andrade

One day in 1999 a woman by the name of Regina José Galindo decided to hang

herself barefoot from an impossibly high arch in the downtown post office of Guatemala

City. Like a black-haired angel wearing a long wrinkled white dress, she descended from

above to a confused crowd, honking cars and police whistling, while clinging with both

hands to the cable that dropped her above the crowd. Men, women and children, some

people wearing indigenous dress, all stopped in the various poses of their everyday lives,

their faces blank while she hung suspended from a harness with a cable coming out of her

back and strapped to her torso. She then did an even kookier thing of taking out a little

notebook tied loosely around her neck and preceded to read her poems, shouting the lyrics

Soy lugar común/como el eco de las voces/el rostro de la luna (“I am a common place/like

the echo of voices/the profile of the moon”) and then tearing out each page and throwing

it out to the people below1.

As the din of honking and whistling rose to a crescendo, Galindo read and tore

faster and people scrambles to catch the poems falling like dead leaves from a shaken tree

while others stared bewildered, shielding their eyes from the sun. Toward the end of the

performance, some began to clap. She tore out the last page, she paused, and stared, and

was then lowered into the crowd, until her feet touched the hot afternoon pavement.

She called the piece “I’m going to shout it to the wind” and it was in the city’s

newspapers the next day; there was speculation about whether the woman was insane,

starved for attention, or just a trendy poet. But in less than five minutes Galindo had

captured the still indefinable, yet widespread zeitgeist of performance art that had now

reached Guatemala. Hanging from one of the oldest buildings in the city, from an arch

more than ten meters off the ground, Galindo was the harbinger of change in a country

emerging from 36 years of civil war – a country where the word “performance” was as

unrecognized as the nascent democracy from which it emerged.

“The idea was that you’re not heard. People from Guatemala are afraid to talk

and express themselves after such a heavy conflict,” Galindo said.

Rosina Cazali, an art critic and curator of Guatemala’s Centro Cultural de

España, remembered the performance well. “It was an absurd situation, a girl hanging

from this arch for no apparent reason,” Cazali said. But it’s an image that people

recognize, and it stayed in their minds and became a part of a popular myth.

When people speak of Galindo now they always say: la que se colgo? The one

who hung herself? Few remember or even know her name, but the phrase has stuck for

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Galindo, a Guatemala City native. Born in 1974, and except for a two-year stint in the

Dominican Republic, she has lived in Guatemala most of her life. She is a college dropout

who writes poetry, draws, and works in graphic design, but her preferred artistic

expression is performance art – an art of symbols and ideas acted out using the body,

usually with no stage, no costumes and sometimes not even an audience.

Although Galindo is the most well-known of a group of artistas postguerra, or

postwar artists, she is not the only one coming to grips with the country’s history of

violence and government repression by using a medium that often takes the political and

makes it personal, metaphorical and poetic. There have been many others: some who

locked themselves in cages with flies, walked 20 kilometers around the city in one day,

married cows, robbed someone at gunpoint, and even publicly used a lavatory without

walls. Although there were many others, friends say Galindo is different. They likened her

to the force of the cart pulling them along, making art cutting edge and recognized. “She

takes us wherever she goes,” one artist said.

With the leap from the post office arch, Galindo simultaneously exposed a nerve

and touched a pulse. Her leap was much like the one that French artist Yves Klein took in

1960 in a piece called “Leap Into the Void.” For this performance Klein jumped from the

second story of a building and swan-dived out onto asphalt with no net. Like Klein and

others, Galindo tapped into a spontaneous art form that challenged borders, was open to

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any person and was based on the simple premise of being live art unfolding right in front

of you.

For Galindo, now an internationally known performance artist who came of age

in the postwar Guatemala of the late 1990s, hanging herself from an arch was just the

beginning. That same year she dangled from the arch, she also performed The sky cries so

much it should have been a woman during which she submerged herself in water until she

could not breathe. She came up for quick gasps of air and then went under again.

In 2000 she injected herself with valium and called the piece “Valium 10ml,” a

performance inspired by the writer Miguel Ángel Asturias, who expressed Galindo’s

almost fatalistic take on her country: “En Guatemala solo se puede vivir a verga.” It’s a

vulgar term meaning that you can only live here drunk or by being unconscious, Galindo

told me. Months later she sealed her naked body into a clear plastic bag thrown into one

of Guatemala City’s municipal dumps for almost two hours in a performance called “We

don’t lose anything by being born.” The video showed Guatemalans hardly noting her

body as they picked through mounds of trash. In 2004 she performed “The Weight of

Blood,” where a liter of blood slowly dripped on her head from a contraption that looked

like a torture machine in the central plaza of Guatemala City.

A couple of months before I met Galindo

in March 2006, I had read about her in a

U.S. magazine showing her walking

barefoot through the streets of Guatemala

City dipping her feet in human blood. She

carried a white basin filled with blood in

her arms and walked from the

Constitutional Court building to the old

National Palace in protest of the ex-

dictator Efraín Ríos Montt's 2003

presidential candidacy. She explained that the footprints represented the thousands of

civilians murdered by the army during the more than 30 years of conflict. She called the

piece Who can erase the traces? and it was one of the performances for which she was

awarded the prestigious 2005 Golden Lion Award for best young artist for performance.

For Galindo the reason she performs is not about getting a message across or to

leave a legacy. It is more like a mandate to put out a question, a point of discussion, on

the table. She’s not the didactic, preachy type, and it’s the dialogue she’s more concerned

about, she said.

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“I’m not trying to change the world,” she told me. “It’s a lie that art can change

or save the world.”

* * *

When I left Guatemala in 1980 at the age of five, I joined the immigration tide of

thousands of people fleeing Guatemala’s civil war, poverty, gangs and corruption to enter

the United States illegally. For many of us who grew up in Guatemala it was a country so

backward that the idea that any kind of art could emerge and flourish in this country –

the place we had thrown ourselves to the mercy of the desert to flee – was beyond

anything we could imagine. But Galindo stayed behind, and was the window into an

entire burgeoning art movement run by urban artists, dancers, and poets. In the aftermath

of the war they were making art guerilla-style, reading their poetry on the streets or

scratching it onto walls and performing on makeshift stages. The reality of little or no

funding for galleries or formal art spaces was all the more reason to take their message

directly to the world.

The origins of Guatemala's civil war date back to the split that emerged after the

United States financially backed a military coup in 1954 that overthrew left-leaning

Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán2. Guzmán’s election was viewed by many Guatemalans as the

first sign of democracy. He initiated land reform and sought to make United Fruit

Company pay taxes on its immense holdings in Guatemala. The country adopted a new

constitution that broadened suffrage and supported the labor and agrarian movement.

The victory was short-lived.

The United States, expanding its Cold War anti-communist agenda, saw these

moves as tainted by Cuba’s communist influence and supported right-wing military

governments in Guatemala until 1988..3A significant period was General Efraín Ríos

Montt’s 18-month presidency, which began in 1982 after a military coup. Historians

believe it was one of the most violent periods of the 36-year internal conflict, resulting in

the 200,000 deaths of mostly indigenous people4. There were death squads, executions,

forced disappearances and torture of noncombatants. The majority of the human rights

violations took place under the destroy-all-opponents policy by Ríos Montt called

“scorched earth.”5

Throughout this civic unrest, there was still theatre and performance, said

Guillermo Ramirez, who worked as a theater director in Guatemala since 1975 and now

teaches performance as part of a presidential human rights commission. He said there

were about 15 theatre groups in Guatemala City including some at the university, in

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churches and in labor unions where theater served as a lifeline for communities. “When a

country is in crisis or suffers a natural disaster like an earthquake, that’s when there’s

more theatre,” Ramirez said. “It did more than exist. It made its presence known and

felt.” Theatre served the same function art had always served, as a way for people to

reflect on the problems in the country and to express themselves.

Like many of the postwar artists, Galindo was born and grew up in Guatemala

City during this period of unrest. One of four children, Galindo was raised in a middle

class home during the 1970s and 1980s when the civil war played out in most of the city

between the guerrillas and the government. Intellectuals were murdered or disappeared;

corpses of others were found in the streets. Galindo was mugged one day by a neighbor

she walked dogs with. But mostly she remembered incidents like a 1980 bombing that

shattered the windows of her school, or the continual reports of Mayans being murdered.

By the time the Peace Accords were signed on December 29, 1996, when Galindo was 22,

thousands had been killed.

Guatemalan artists María Adela Díaz and Jessica Lagunas refer to that year as

the “awakening.”

“Although you couldn’t see that much change in the country, something really

happened internally,” said Díaz, a colleague of Galindo. “Writers, artists, and video

makers, we all felt it; we were going out into the streets and telling people what we

thought about everything. It was a perfect time to do it.”

Galindo had dropped out of college by then, but was winning prizes for her

poetry. She ran with different groups of artists and poets and remembered using cocaine

and spending a few days in jail for possession of drugs. She had shaved off her hair and

added tattoos – a wing, a vulture, a spider’s web – and the police thought she was a

mara, a gang member. She ended up on probation for a year.

“My poor dad,” Galindo said of her father, a well-respected Guatemalan judge.

If Galindo seemed headed for no good, she wasn’t. She and her fellow artists were

rethinking Guatemalan art.

The postwar artists “weren’t in salons or cocktails, they were in the streets with

the people, listening, and seeing reality and suffering it to be able to produce,” said

Dorian Bedoya, the founder of Caja Lúdica, an artists’ cooperative. Caja Lúdica formed

during Octubreazul or BlueOctober held in 2000 as part of a 14-day festival with

hundreds of performances. It turned the entire downtown historic center into a

performance laboratory.

Galindo’s generation used the new space of peace to produce art without

compromises. They specifically settled on performance art, Ramirez said, because they

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wanted to speak about the collective memory of the war, and to create the reflection of

that time period.

The appeal of performance art for artists in Guatemala was that it was a practical

art form requiring no large scale production or sponsorship. It eliminated the need for

money, for a gallery, museum or stage, and gave the artists the freedom to respond to

events and ideas quickly using their bodies and any medium, space, or audience. Their

bodies became a stage or laboratory to pose questions, evoke memories, or inscribe

images, to whoever was willing to stop on the street and watch.

“What our artists told the world was ‘we don’t have the money, but we have the

ideas,’” Ramirez said. “Our bodies became our tools.”

Galindo and some of her fellow artists

began working with other artists and

galleries in countries like Italy, Ecuador,

Chile, and Costa Rica. They also

performed at Biennales, which gave them

even greater exposure. “What we gave

birth to in Guatemala was a radical

necessity for expression and a larger

artistic consciousness and forms of using

art,” said Luis González Palma, a

photographer now based in Argentina who

is internationally known for his portraits of

the Maya community.

Other artists’ work included performances such as Díaz’s “Ambrosia” done in

2000 where she locked herself in a Plexiglas box with thousands of horseflies swirling

hungrily around her body. Lagunas, now an active media artist in New York, produced

feminist work such as “The Shadow” in 1999 during which she placed red high-heel shoes

into a large square slab of cement. The last day of the exhibition she pulled out the shoes

from the platform, as an act of liberation.

More formally trained and conceptual artists like Anibal López, also known as A-

153567, created from his Guatemalan identification number, began pioneering their

performances. In “The Loan, 2000” Lopez holds up a 40-something-year-old man by

gunpoint in a wealthier zone of Guatemala City. The unwitting stranger was informed

that the act was not a robbery, but a “loan” which A-153567 would return to his children

using “visual language.” Lopez received $116 from the man and with that money he

commissioned the performance and posted up a description of the incident.

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Lopez was internationally recognized for his performance “30 of June,” which in

Guatemala is the Day of the Soldier. In the extravaganza, Lopez staged a military parade

with tanks and hundreds of soldiers dressed in full uniform. They marched as ghost-like

figures dressed in shredded camouflage material, woven through them. This piece won him

the same sought-after Golden Lion award a few years before Galindo.

In Guatemala’s postwar political context, performance sprouted in much the same

way as it did in the rest of the world – as a response to postwar social and political events,

such as the bombing of Hiroshima, Cold War politics and the Vietnam War. Often the

body became a tool for protesting. For example Yayoi Kusama performed “Anti War

Naked Happening and Flag Burning at Brooklyn Bridge in 1968,” during which

performers only wore Kusama’s polka dots on their naked bodies. In 1971, French artist

Gina Pane self-inflicted cuts onto her feet in “L’Escalade” during which she climbed a

ladder that had blades attached to the steps as a metaphor for the political oppression she

felt in post-‘68 Europe6.

During Octubreazul Galindo presented “We don’t lose anything by being born,” a

piece she repeated in Guatemala City where she had friends dump her plastic-sealed body

into the municipal dump. She also performed “Waiting for Prince Charming,” during

which she laid naked on a bed, covered with a bridal white sheet that had a hole cut into

it making her vagina visible.

The international community took note of what was happening in Guatemala.

Invitations to perform poured in; as did awards. Galindo was invited to Costa Rica; the

Venice Biennale, to Canada, Peru, Prague, Albania and France. The invitations gave her

the money to perform in other countries, and to produce performances that in turn could

be documented on video and sold – one of the few ways performance artists can sell their

work. Galindo’s videos of her performances now sell for $1,000 to upwards of $5,000 to

curators and collectors. But, more importantly, she took Guatemalan performance art to a

new level.

“She was the first person who shattered this urban space with a strong image that

defined a new body of work,” Cazali said.

* * *

When I arrived at the airport in the Dominican Republic, where Galindo had lived

since early 2005, she and her boyfriend, a performance artist named David Peréz, were

holding a sign with my name in all uppercase letters. Galindo poked her head out into the

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aisle of oncoming passengers to see if she could catch a glimpse of me. It felt as if I was

being met by baggy-clothed teenagers in midriff shirts and sneakers.

I followed the smack-smack of Galindo’s flip-flops as she stepped out into the

humid and salty island air. She had light skin and a hooked nose that made her look like

many of the ladinos of Guatemala, who were mixed with Spanish and indigenous blood.

Mostly she was diminutive, about five feet tall and thin. She had a way of taking up

space by throwing her feet, arms and pelvis outward as she walked. Every time I asked

her a question she bent her head to listen more intently.

Inside her car, Galindo’s feet barely reached the pedals of her tiny hatchback,

which she called her “silver bullet.” She zipped through the traffic, honking, blasting

house music, smoking pot and yelling “Diablo!” or hell, at other cars. There were few

lights and no stop signs, and Galindo made lanes where there were none. Over the next

several days, she occasionally mentioned that doctors had diagnosed her with bipolar

disorder, or “maladjustments,” but that it was hard to tell whether this was true, or part

of a performance she was chasing down in her mind.

I asked if these maladjustments influenced her work.

“Who defines if I have a mental illness, el maldito sistema?” the damned system,

she asked. “What a question! I say I’m bipolar because I’m fucking around. It’s the joke of

making fun of yourself, of schemes and of what people say or think of you. People and the

system always classify you as a way of oppressing you.”

After a few days, Peréz persuaded Galindo to sit down and show me her

performances. As she flipped through videos on her laptop, I was taken aback by the large

number and creativity of her work. There were the clearly political ones like the blood-

dripping walk in protest. There were also the strangely funny and macabre pieces, like the

ones when she paid a professional woman wrestler to beat her up in the ring, or took out

an advertisement to pay the winner of a bare-fist fighting contest where dozens lined up

take the first punch at each other. In 2001 she wore a housekeeper’s uniform for one

month in a piece called “Angelina”, and in “Boda Galindo-Herrera, 2004,” Galindo

married herself.

Galindo pushed herself every year by doing performances that involved a test of

physical endurance and a reinvention of her body as art. She shaved all the hair from her

body and walked naked through the streets of Venice; she cut the word “PERRA” or

BITCH into her leg with a knife in 2005. For a piece called “Himenoplastia” she

underwent surgery for a hymen replacement. Her mother said she was aghast to get a call

that Galindo had been admitted to the emergency room after the surgery.

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But something more disturbing emerged as well. There was masochism to

Galindo’s work, a pattern of self-inflicted violence on her usually naked body that made

me cringe. I wanted to see what happened next. How far would she go?

I kept watching. In 2002, she taped her eyes shut for five days and traveled back

to Guatemala from Peru by airplane in Until Seeing.” In 2003 she enclosed herself into a

small space by cementing cinder blocks around herself in “Proxemica.”

“It’s like when you die, and they put in the last cement block on you and all you

hear is the sound of it being placed,” she told me. She fell asleep inside and enjoyed the

darkness. A day later, she broke free with a hammer.

Often, she said, she gets an idea, researches it and will even take classes before

doing the performance. In “Metal 2006,” performed in Florida, she learned how to shoot

a gun. In “Skin,” the piece where she shaved her body and walked naked through the

streets of Venice, she read a book and examined the relationship between her body, space

and contamination.

“The skin is a symbol of where you come from,” she said. “Because I was coming

from a third world country, I had to demonstrate that.”

“I used it in my first poems and in my initial performances, so I stuck with it,” she

said. “It was always a source of pleasure and learning. Every performance or experiment

opened me up to such different emotions that I suppose I became obsessed with the

experience and that process.”

Many of Galindo’s pieces resembled some of the feminist work from other

countries. One of the pieces helped her win Galindo the Golden Lion award was “Blows,”

performed in the 51st Biennial in Venice in 2005. In it, the screen is blacked out and there

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is only the sound of her hitting herself with a leather belt. She is locked up in a room

where no one can see her. Inside, she held a microphone so that people could hear every

one of the 279 blows she gave herself. It is one hit for every woman assassinated in

Guatemala from the beginning of 2005 to the date of the performance in June.

“I wanted people to hear it, just how it happens, that you always hear it and don’t

understand what’s going on inside,” Galindo said. “It’s that external observation of our

internal stories.”

The ghostly sound of the belt stayed with viewers well after the piece ended. It

echoed through to her next performance, “Vertigo, 2005, Albania.” The piece began with

her naked and harnessed body being lifted by a rope that creaked as she rose. The harness

pressed hard against her skin as she reached a height of nine and a half feet. Spit and urine

poured from her shaking body. Viewers whispered and a flash went off in the background.

For 45 minutes she hung and the pressure of gravity and a new feeling of vertigo made her

cry.

“I was so scared and I had a very physical and psychological emotion,” she said.

“I was thinking how much I couldn’t stand it the whole time. I was trying to breathe and

to concentrate my energy but I couldn’t.”

It is hard to watch her in pain, I told her.

“I wanted to show the fragility of life and how life is sustained by a very thin

thread,” she said. Now, she said matter-of-factly, 45 minutes was too short.

* * *

On a gray, cold October morning in 2006, Galindo woke up in Brussels in her sixth

floor hotel room. It was almost 10 a.m. and she had dark circles under her eyes from

roving the streets of the city with friends. At this very hour she was supposed to be

checking herself into the psychiatric hospital down the street, but instead she was

stumbling over clothes and video equipment, searching for the straight jacket she was to

wear for the next three days.

“Who has it?” Galindo asked her Italian gallerist, Ida Pisani, who had just arrived

wearing a white trench coat and big dark sunglasses.

“I think the curator does,” said Pisani throwing up her arms.

In the same room was Galindo’s fellow artist and sidekick, López, who was

cursing and manically raiding the fridge for mini-Jack Daniels bottles while Pisani,

perched at the edge of the bed, indulged in a cigarette. All three arrived yesterday and had

been camped out in Galindo’s hotel playing catch-up from months of not seeing each

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other. Galindo was now six months pregnant carrying her and Perez’s baby, Lopez was

still living in Italy after having finished a show with his paintings and performances, and

Pisani was still curating and selling Galindo’s work at a rapid pace. Amid the smoke-filled

room, Galindo waddled around. “Ay dios,” Oh god, she said periodically.

“Are you nervous?” I asked.

“No,” she said simply. I’m going to sleep all day.” It is a psychiatric ward, after

all, she said, and began packing her small bag. The curators who commissioned Galindo

to perform “Straight Jacket” waited downstairs by the elevator to escort Galindo to the

hospital. A Norwegian filmmaker was poised nearby with a camera and tripod in hand,

while the museum’s film crew – stationed at the hospital for the past two hours – kept

calling about Galindo’s start time. An hour later, when Galindo took the stairs down to

the first floor, followed by Lopez and Pisani, her face was changed and she was poised

like an artist.

On this particular trip she was commissioned to perform Straight Jacket for the

“Mankind” exhibit in Brussels. The city is one of the hubs of the performance art

movement Rolf Quaghebeur, curator for the “Mankind” exhibit put on by the Center for

Religious Art, saw Galindo’s work at the Venice Biennial last year, and was struck by her

authenticity. He said she was, “not using her cultural identity as an image. She is living

the problems of her country.” The idea she proposed was simple: to put herself in a

psychiatric institute for three days locked up in a straight jacket so her upper limbs would

be fixed. She would be able to walk, but all the things that a person does in a day going

to the toilet, washing, eating, getting dressed – would have to be done for her. “The idea

is simple, but with big implications,” Quaghebeur said.

It is what makes her work so authentic, Quaghebeur said. “She goes beyond the

limits of her own body and uses it as a metaphor, in the way that a painter uses his canvas

and his painting to express himself, she does it with her body.”

Galindo’s use of her body is something she has in common with other

artists.Nudity was a bold way to conquer a public space.

“In part it’s revolt to use our bodies to express the truth,” said Díaz. “It’s like our

body says everything with one action. As a woman, to expose your naked body is to

expose all of your life. We use it as medium to convey to people that nothing can stop us.”

Ramirez said it’s no coincidence that in performance the main vehicle and tool is

the body. For women performers in particular, it is a powerful one. “A naked woman is a

symbol to be studied. It’s a symbol of rebellion and aesthetic and it’s a shout for justice. It

is so strong that is has the power to convey a message through a performance. And this

happens in all of Latin America. It’s not just a Guatemala phenomenon.” In the 1970s,

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United States women performance artists used their bodies in much the same way. The art

had a confessional, cathartic quality which often involved self-analysis, endurance and

visual engagement: like in “Kubota’s Vagina Painting, 1965,” made with a red brush held

by her vagina, or “Faith Wilding,” during which a woman sits immobile in a room

speaking in a low, monotonous voice, listing the endless “waiting” of women. “Waiting

to get married/waiting for my baby…”7

Galindo’s work, like many of her European performance art predecessors, is also

socially conscious and that’s another reason Quaghebeur asked her to perform in Brussels

– she is continuing the tradition. But she does so in a way that remains loyal to her

country and its struggles.

“It really hurts me what happens in Guatemala,” Galindo said. “I often feel I

have a debt and responsibility and have to do something, I have to say something because

the history has been so desgraciada, wretched, that I feel I have to say something.”

It’s statements like this that make Quaghebeur believe that Galindo must have

some faith in art’s power to change things.

When I watched Galindo in Brussels, however, I had the odd sense of not being at

a performance at all. In a psychiatric hospital there was no telling who the audience was

or when the performance began and ended. I wondered why a hospital would agree to

this. More importantly, what did this have to do with Guatemala? It seemed to push even

further the boundaries of performance art.

As she walked to the hospital with Pisani

and Lopez, the whole procession suddenly

felt like a reality TV show being filmed by

the Norwegian filmmaker and myself.

When Galindo finally arrived at the

hospital, pale, but focused, she was

escorted upstairs to a tidy two-room

dormitory with a single bed. Galindo

smiled upon entering, pulled open the

drapes, inspected her surroundings, all the

while marveling at how in Guatemala this

room was better than most hotels, not to mention hospitals. The small gleaming white

straight jacket she would wear for the next three days was neatly laid out on a single

metal frame bed, arms extended outward. Galindo stopped inspect it, and then proceeded

to put away her things while the camera crew filmed her every move. One of the curators

helped Galindo put on the jacket, tying the strings tightly behind Galindo’s back in a

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bow. Galindo’s face had a resigned distracted look to it. Once the shirt was on, she paced

the around trying out her new armless body. She found a room where patients were

watching television. She tried to talk to them, but most of them did not know Spanish or

English, or they would leave the room when she walked in. She had no script; she didn’t

know any of the patients. A nurse had to help her pour water into a glass and held up it

up to her mouth. The nurse followed her into the bathroom to help; the camera crew

stayed outside. Galindo’s resignation soon turned to frustration and impatience.

She was bored by the “silence” of the hospital, she said later. It was the same

silence of the Dominican Republic that she could no longer endure. The calm

overwhelmed her, she complained.

The patients were nervous when she entered rooms. There was a pregnant woman

in a straight jacket, something that conjured up memories of previous restraints used on

them, Quaghebeur said – of course they would be nervous. Not only that, but someone

was following her around with a video camera documenting the whole thing. “Who is this

woman?” “What is she thinking bringing a baby in here when we’ve been here for 20

years?” “Perhaps she is crazier than we are?” That’s the reaction Quaghebeur and the

director of the institution received when introducing the idea of doing these performance

months beforehand to the patients.

At one point an older man reached across to scratch Galindo’s nose after staring at

her wrinkling her face over and over again. Some of the patients walked by and ignored

her, others stared, but most of them stayed away, except for the few curious ones. It is

was strange image, a pregnant woman in a straight jacket, a form of restraint no longer

used in most mental institutions except, Galindo is quick to point out, in Guatemala.

She missed Guatemala, she said while sitting in the backyard of the hospital.

Everyday she read reports of the violence.

“I suppose it’s the normal nostalgia

people feel when they miss their country,”

she said adding that when she’s in the

Dominican Republic, “all I think about is

what’s going on in Guatemala.”

She planned to return in the next

few months, to have her baby there.

Galindo is unfazed when I ask why

she would want to raise a child amid the

ongoing violence.

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“You can’t know what it is to live in Guatemala, unless you are from there. The

picture people have of Guatemala is a dark one. I grew up in Guatemala, my family is

there, and I know what it is to live there.”

* * *

In December 2006, Galindo, now eight months pregnant, returned with Pérez to

Guatemala. Her return was quiet, she did not contact friends or fellow artists, she lived

with her parents, she looked for a house surrounded by trees and kept herself occupied by

developing ideas for upcoming performances. On the morning of December 29 she spent

two hours before sunrise working with someone on a piece of art she had only thought of

a few days earlier to mark the 10th anniversary of the Peace Accords.

Guatemalans still asked “what peace?” Many feel there is a new war where close

to 6,000 people are murdered each year. They die in gang wars, domestic abuse and the

simple but violent settling of scores. The anger over the ongoing violence erupted at the

government’s celebration of the Peace Accords. As President Oscar Berger spoke at the

National Cultural Palace a group of some 20 young people shouted. “Murderers of

peace!” There is no peace!”

As police showed them out, Berger continued. Outside, amid the stilt walkers, ice

cream vendors, clowns and music, the protesters insisted, “There is no peace!”

“Everything in Guatemala is a game, when in reality it’s a tragedy,” said Galindo.

“It’s a stupidity, a masquerade that the government celebrated peace with games, clowns,

and a party when what people are worried about is the violence and that’s part of the

story.”

The piece that marked her homecoming was not far from where Galindo hung

herself from the arch in 1999. Los Correos had now become a City Cultural Center, a hub

of some 20 art and performance collectives, schools and organizations and independent

theatres. The open courtyard resonated with the sounds of piano and ballet instruction;

children lay on the tiled floor painting, students juggled, learned how to stilt-walk, while

in the distance the piano played to the sound of ballet rehearsals.

Most of the programs were free. Even the restoration of the building was

presented as a class in carpentry. An auditorium and gallery offered space for art that

didn’t exist in the 1990s when Galindo and others performed on the streets. Lopez, once,

like Galindo and other artists, on the fringes, had his own office here as did Caja Lúdica,

which received city and international funding.

15

The performances still happen, but not just in the city anymore. Bedoya’s groups,

much like Ramirez’s, performed in the rural areas of Guatemala and taught young people

how to tell their stories using performance.

“It’s important for people to come together amid this violence and intolerance,”

Bedoya said. “People here for any little thing will start hitting each other, but if you start

creating community in the street, in the rest of the country, then dialogue begins to form

and things start to get resolved.”

Cazali said that the upswing in violent crime demonstrated that the government

has failed. “We have all these pressures from the increasing violence. The economy is less

clear, we have a ghost on our shoulders in terms of narco-trafficking and in politics there’s

nothing that defines a future. We have the feeling that everything is short-term, it is like

makeup, and we are covering things up that obviously don’t have a lot of solutions.”

She blamed the chaos for preventing a new generation of artists from emerging.

“We have to close one cycle before we begin another and to do that is very

complicated because the new groups have to take their own spaces and to find their own

language,” Cazali said.

In this environment, Bedoya adds, Guatemalans remain apprehensive and

suspicious of one another. It is a “collective debt” from decades of oppression and social

injustice. Art should play an essential role. There has been an eerie type of silence since

many of the postwar artists became successful and moved to other countries.

“It’s not clear what the new generation is and what they will be evolving into

with a new language,” said Cazali, who doesn’t doubt the art movement’s continuation.

Galindo’s return could change this and trigger a new energy.

As the sun set on the Parque Central, the usual sense of abandon that comes over

the now crime-ridden downtown district has descended. Galindo’s piece remained in the

dingy open plaza surrounded by tattered newspapers and trash blowing in the wind.

The piece is a large circle – about 20 feet – of lush green leaves with an inner ring

of white flowers topped by a splurge of small white lilies at the mid-arc. The placing of a

bed of white chrysanthemums seemed out of place with the grimy sidewalk caked with

the day’s scraps of food and trash.

Young soldiers dressed in green camouflage and armed with semi-automatic rifles

had just lowered the Guatemalan flag and Galindo’s flowered corona was still there. “No

mas violencia,” no more violence, had been chalked on the pavement a few feet away,

some of the letters erased by footsteps.

Earlier, an older woman and a young girl in a pink skirt bent down with her purse

pulled tightly to her body and stared at the crown. Children hopped in and out of the

16

circle and soon the thin petals started falling and floating away. A group had stopped and

stared and walked by.

“It must be in memory of those who died in the war,” one said.

But it wasn’t, Galindo said, “‘The Crown,’ is more for the dead now and the

reality of Guatemala now. The first day of 2007 there were 29 dead. But sometimes we

have thick skins here; the Chapin (Guatemalan) has this way of thinking that if it doesn’t

happen to him, it’s not happening.” As she prepared for the birth of their child, she moved

slower and more comfortably in her body, still wearing baggy clothes and the same shirts

that didn’t cover her belly which was now full and round. From time to time she rested her

hand on it as she sat across from me. There was still a fearlessness to her that was

unchanged from her days in the Dominican Republic. At 10 p.m. while drug dealers and

thieves stood nearby in the completely abandoned streets, Galindo was home. In March of

2007, her daughter was born in Guatemala City and Galindo named her Isla – the same

name she used to refer to her beloved Dominican Republic.

“Not all of Guatemala is all shit,” she had said to me in the spring of 2006.

“Things continue to happen and more spaces form, things are waking up slowly and time

will tell which ones will stay up.” And, for her, that is just fine.

“Let the whole thing explode.”

1 Galindo, Regina Jose. Private collection of poetry. “Soy lugar común/como el eco de las voces/el

rostro de la luna. /Tengo dos tetas/diminutas/la nariz oblonga/la estatura del pueblo/Miope/de

lengua vulgar/nalgas caídas/piel de naranga. /Me sitúo frente al espejo/y me masturbo/soy mujer/la

más común/entre las comunes.”

2 Online News Hour. December 30, 1996, PBS transcript.

3 www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/guatemala.

4 The Historical Clarification Commission (CEH) and the Archbishop's Office for Human Rights

(ODHAG), estimates that government forces were responsible for more than 80 percent of the

violations.

5 Smith, Tim. Assistant Professor, University of South Florida, interview on December 23, 2006.

6 Goldberg, Live Art Since 1960, 119. 7 Goldberg, Live Art Since 1960, 53.