Language — sometimes a single word — can open a universe of understanding in which we may find our own place. Xigagueta — at once an symbolic object, an experimental arts platform and a vessel for conviviality, as enacted by Oaxacan curator Eva Posas following her fellowship at the Nieuwe Instituut.
This essay is part of our partnership with the Nieuwe Instituut. A series of 10 contributions with 10 former fellows to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Research Fellowship Programme.
In our Nations without State, commonly referred to as “indigenous” people1, our languages are violently “disappeared”, forcibly prevented from being taught or learned. The loss of our mother tongues also means the loss of our knowledge of the world. Even more urgently, loss of language equals loss of our land and our home, legally speaking. Now more than ever, we need to cultivate forms of spreading our languages, and with them, our capacity to reimagine the world through our own imaginaries and to record it both in and beyond our words, expressed in any form. In an attempt to coalesce and counter such epistemic violence on our own terms, Xigagueta was born.
"The loss of our mother tongues also means the loss of our knowledge of the world."
A Phantom background
Since 2018, I have researched and developed the concept of ‘Phantom Languages’ as a way of naming the language that inhabits embodied knowledge, (in)corporeal encounters, and communication beyond the written and spoken word. I propose that in this other realm of language, the fire of non-hegemonic languages — such as Diidxazá, the language of the Binnizá2 people to which I belong — remain latent yet lambent as a vital flame. Phantom Languages are another way of reconnecting one’s word-soul.3 They nourish a cognitive territory that persists when land is stolen and our culture taken away. They are the reverberations between the body and the environment, the threshold between verbal and nonverbal language. That language which vibrates in the encounter of bodies, objects, and territory, claims its right to life.
If non-hegemonic languages are mediated by colonial languages, I believe that Phantom Languages inhabit what writer NourbeSe Philip calls "the inner space" of language4. It is an intimate interior that inevitably reflects itself in the outer world as a phantom, not of what is lost, but of what remains alive beyond grammar. In that sense, Phantom Languages hide beyond words and are felt through the symbolic and the corporeal, as resonances in specific places, moments, and things. They borrow the form of objects: candles can be instruments of power, music played in a band can be camouflage, garments can be maps, stones can be messages. Objects are fully charged with language beyond our definition; they decode a hidden agreement between members of a community. This is how language moves, hides and seeps from body to place, place to object, and object to body again.
One such object is the xigagueta, considered a Binnizá vessel made from the shell of a calabash gourd, painted and adorned with flowers. The same flora is embroidered on the huipiles [5] of Binnizá women. From the Diidxazá word xiga, meaning "gourd," and gueta, meaning "tortilla," this "tortilla gourd" traditionally hangs on the walls of the Binnizá homes and is activated only at specific times during ritual celebrations. At such collective moments, the xigagueta serves as a travelling amulet, accompanying a festive pilgrimage. In this way, the xigaguetas mark places in the village and trace invisible landscapes, pointing to the connections between the people involved. Later, the xigaguetas return to the walls of the houses, in a posture of dormancy, awaiting the next activation. The xigagueta is thus a communal and poetic tool. They exalt the culminating moments of family and community celebrations. They distribute offerings, appreciation, and esteem among the people participating in the gathering.
Taking the Xigagueta-object as a central Binnizá epistemology, the Xigagueta-programme reenacts this connection to activate the relationships among and reflection of people from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca, in the southwest of Mexico. We perform something like an embodied library, a speaking architecture of flesh and bone, of sips of nectar and the halos of flowers. Thus, we keep creating diverse, endemic imaginaries that move the ghosts within language; socialising an invisible yet persistent fire.
"We perform something like an embodied library, a speaking architecture of flesh and bone, of sips of nectar and the halos of flowers."
An Isthmus of Isthmuses
Also known as xicalpextle, the xigagueta — widely used in the Isthmus — actually has its origins in Chiapa de Corzo, Chiapas. The xigagueta arrived from that town to the Isthmus as a means of transporting provisions to this trading region and later transcended as a symbolic complement to the characteristic Binnizá Isthmus attire. Due to their geographical location, Juchitán and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec have historically been points of flow, and trade between neighbouring regions as far away as Central America, forming a focus of attention, a kind of centre in the South. In that sense, the xigagueta represents exchange, human flux and identities in movement facilitated by the landscape of that geography.
Through Miguel Covarrubias and other Mexican modernists like Diego Rivera, we have an image of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec depicted as an exuberant land: a fascinating, forgotten, unexplored “bottle-neck of jungle and brush”6, “beauty, tropical allure, the Mexican tropics — a space filled with sensuality and absolute freedom”7. These exoticising images and descriptions derived from a State instruction to mystify the region, their “indigenous” people to — at the same time — make a clear racial divide. This is how the State enhanced a Mestizo national identity based on the “glorious, tropical, sensual and working culture” that lived there, among other racial profiling from other nations without state while imposing a “regional charm” that could promote interoceanic transport infrastructures. On one side, the State highlighted their greatness; on the other side, imposed Spanish-language policies alongside social discrimination and systemic violence that pushed assimilation of the original inhabitants.
Amidst these acts, I must say, there are many isthmuses within the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, kept alive by its diverse people. It is a vibrant constellation of towns and villages, which might be Binnizá or one of the other Nations without a State in the region: the Ikoots, Chinanteco, Zoque, Chontal, Ayuuk, among others…
Becoming Xigagueta
What exactly is the Xigagueta programme? Xigagueta is a collective research initiative, a public programme, [and] a radical platform conceived as a way to entwine processes of writing and artistic production from and within the Binnizá and Ikoots cognitive territory. Departing from Binnizá and Ikoots life notions — from our understanding of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec territory and the worldviews gathered in our languages — Xigagueta traces forms of cultural sublevation, to amplify its contemporary resonances. Xigagueta involves oral practices of poetry and narrative, arts and crafts creation and making public the collective work. Xigagueta encourages writing, creating, critical thinking and translating in Diidxazá, Ombeayiüts and ideally other non-hegemonic languages.
From 2024 until January 2025, Xigagueta initiated a sustained assembly, an interpersonal dialogue among artists, craftsmen, writers, and thinkers to come together and develop something that resembles a library of our Binnizá and Ikoots thinking. For the first edition, Xigagueta worked with elementary school teacher and textile activist Ana Palacios, visual artist and illustrator Diego Matus, visual artist Dell Alvarado, elementary school teacher and writer Fernando Magariño, and filmmaker and writer Paulina Amador. Writer Victor Fuentes was also present, for counsel and close companionship, as an observant ear.
In the first instance, Xigagueta convened regular encounters to think and create together from our languages, Diidxazá or Ombeayiüts. Later, we published an outcome — considering publishing as the act of making public — through a public programme. This public event was fundamental to open up the study circle and share our explorations orally and physically. Each dialogue, each proposal and decision was led by the participants and we had to listen carefully on what concerns us, what intrigues us; what worries us and what inspires us; what being Binnizá means, despite the place we are or the social implications we face.
Inside the gourd
The first edition of Xigagueta took place in Unión Hidalgo, a municipality at the end of the Sierra Madre Sur — crossed by the rivers Espíritu Santo, Chicapa, beside the estuary Estero Guié and the coastal lagoon, Laguna Superior. There, we walked through fields trying to find the source of one of the rivers that feed the estuary. In the area of Unión Hidalgo, the wind farms of Spanish and French transnational corporations were first situated, gradually taking over the Isthmus land. One day we walked for six hours with “Polvo”, a farmer who has worked on several ranches in the area, so he knows about the plants, animals, and other stories linked to these fields, with their wind turbines always in the background.
Unión Hidalgo is also where Galería Gubidxa is located. When Victor Fuentes retired from teaching, he turned his own home into Galería Gubidxa, which serves the purposes of a cultural centre. He started it to foster art as a way to build awareness around the environment, to fight the pollution of the river and crucially, to serve as a platform for Binnizá culture. Under the shadow of a pochote tree, Gubidxa was the home that gave shelter to performative readings, cooking classes, workshops, exhibition and conversations sparked by the Xigagueta programme.
Without wishing to insist on western labels — without relapsing — Xigagueta seeks to find itself as its own curatorial gourd-vessel from Binnizá thought. If the word "art" doesn't exist in Diidxazá, then we don’t need to insist on that label, or other categories derived from a globalised semantics. It doesn’t mean that there is a lack of powerful artistic creation. Quite the contrary, we — as any other nation without state — are abundantly endowed with a sensitive, sensual manner of thinking; a complex field of imagination and therefore of inspiration, that translates into fierce creation and anti-hegemonic reflection. It unfolds in our own way. This is what participants have developed through rich proposals in essays, poetic writings, and visual works on the construction of identity, land, crime, belonging, textile justice, the romanticisation of indigenous peoples, extractive violences, technology, silence, loneliness, translation as transgression and emancipation. Latent energy seeks to be unleashed.
"We — as any other nation without state — are abundantly endowed with a sensitive, sensual manner of thinking; a complex field of imagination and therefore of inspiration, that translates into fierce creation and anti-hegemonic reflection."
As a self-taught visual artist, Diego Matus explored the Isthmus of Tehuantepec as an introspective landscape, a tool for transformation and intuitive expansion through ecosystems redolent with luminous bodies, and atmospheres with spiritual symbolism. Family, stones, people on the streets, plants — everything can be a teacher at the same level. There is a very strong link between ecosystems and our ancestors, manifested through empirical herbal remedies, where the healing of body and soul is manifested. For Matus, the flowers encountered on the way to his grandma’s house are a landscape of the utmost importance. Thinking about the meaning of a garden in the Isthmus — which is more like the wide space in between houses — is also part of reconsidering a relationship with the land, and the blurred lines of what property and ownership mean.
Guendaabiani' is one of the most abstract and important concepts in Binnizá thought. One of its meanings is wisdom, meaning the correct relationship and communication between the faculties of the mind and body. It also refers to being of all light, or beings of all lights. Matus chose Guendaabiani' as the name for the “estandartes” or flags that he developed to be activated in a procession. Based on an often-used object in Binnizá processions, he reconfigures the meaning of the flag or banner as a celebration of knowledge, rather than a symbol of power. He also created a visual communication for the programme, based on ideas of movement, dance, wind, and the region's flora and fauna. We couldn’t be more honoured to have his work as a visual identity.
“We’re learning how to be, how to exist in our own language”. This statement by poet, translator and elementary school teacher Fernando Magariño, was expressed in one of our sessions. Through his poetry, Fernando has been diving into the richness of Zá thought and the depth of the Diidxazá language, through images laden with symbolism and reflections on memory and time. Specifically, he focused on writing about the Didxabixe’, that represents a "word of silence”, one that transcends the physical, anchoring itself in the void and the intermediate space where words not only express, but also construct realities. Through metaphors such as "sweeping until there is no solid ground" and "clouds that know nothing of perishability," his work addresses both material and spiritual purification, alluding to the act of “cleaning” as a process of cultural and emotional healing. The evocative language in Fernando’s writing The Didxabixe' or Word of Silence asserts the connection between language, culture, and memory, inviting us to cherish the knowledge of the Binnigula'sa as an act of poetry and resistance.
Language revitalisation, also referred to as language revival or reversing language shift is a common term we can frequently hear in the context of languages without state. Those kinds of terms already imply a judgement about the state of a tongue. Such a paternalistic gaze is unwanted. We decide when our language is dead. We translate ourselves, we don’t need someone to come translate for us. We can translate how we see fit, playfully, from our own hearts. Nations without state languages can adapt themselves to their own context. Through everyday life and simple acts such as sharing a drink, we can also translate our language. That’s why Magariño also did a cooking class on Cuuba Ladxiguenda — a drink made with seeds — so we could sip Diidxazá, internalising.
"We decide when our language is dead. We translate ourselves, we don’t need someone to come translate for us. We can translate how we see fit, playfully, from our own hearts."
Language weaves. Language is woven into the materials and objects we use.
“Ay! Diidxazá, Diidxazá, tongue that gives life. // I know that you will die // the day that the sun dies.” [8] — a famous line by Gabriel López Chiñas, part of his poem Didxazá/ El Zapoteco, perhaps one of his most famous ones. Artist Ana Palacios, in collaboration with artisan artist Ofelia Gijón, managed to weave a huipil alluding to the same poem, but this time written in their own Ombeayiüts language instead. By doing so, the artists intertwined the two language forms that they’re trying to keep alive: both Ombeayiüts and backstrap loom-weaving. In an installation made with fishnets, sand, stones and huipiles from Ikoots artisan Gijón, and the essay Telling Threads, Palacios reflected on textile justice, and how its materiality literally carries our languages. As both a Binnizá and an Ikoots woman, she wrote about her family history, reminding us that — just like the xigagueta or tortilla gourd — migration can occur across countries and continents, but also between towns like Juchitán and San Mateo del Mar, just 50 kilometres away.
A small fragment of her text:
Beyond aesthetics, and the fact that currently "textiles are in fashion" for designers of world-class brands and contemporary art museums, it is necessary to remember that each piece is situated, and by being situated, it is recognised as an element of voice and also of history.
Textiles speak to us profoundly, not only through their shapes and colours, but also through the stories they carry. They generate a unique way of seeing the world, as they are a tangible manifestation of our identity and the relationships we establish with the environment we inhabit. When we interact with them, we are not just observing an object, but participating in an ongoing dialogue with the past, the present, and the transformations of the future. Thus, textiles are not just a material, but a vehicle of knowledge and a way of understanding our place in the world.
I hope that one day we can read more stories written by us, and not by outsiders who, from an anthropological perspective, come to research and write about us. We are also capable of telling our own stories, without the intervention of third parties. This work is a step towards new ways of expressing what we feel and questioning ourselves, but it is also a step towards making narratives visible.
Our language will die when the sun dies. Ombeayiüts apndrom ombas, wüx apdndrom ombas teat nüt.9
"I hope that one day we can read more stories written by us, and not by outsiders who, from an anthropological perspective, come to research and write about us."
What is territory? With Gui’chi’ ze’ lu, visual artist Dell Alvarado relates her roots through maps and cartographies, the very tools that facilitated early extractive and colonial forces. Her work is based in counter-cartographies, understanding them as a form of collective affections, a recording of agreements, a visualisation of the things that maps don’t show. Alvarado delivered an alternative mapping of the territory contrasting the natural resources extraction in Unión Hidalgo. A big map of the area was available for people to intervene, tracing other lines, other more personal expressions of relating and thinking about the land. It transformed into a communal constellation of routes and feelings. Next to it, the small format paintings done with pigments from regional soil, observe her hometown, establishing a dialogue with neighbours, subtly denouncing the extraction of wind resources by foreign companies as well as the rehabilitation of the interoceanic train that facilitates even further more extraction. This affective mapping has allowed her to reconnect with the community, creating a sense of belonging within the urban landscape, the everyday and the recognition of a particular territory.
“One always goes back to the beginning”. This phrase by filmmaker and writer Paulina Amador somehow summarises our complex relationship, in terms of being pushed to leave the places that we come from. It also refers to her own creative path, after teaching herself the techniques of filmmaking and re-learning how to write in Diidxazá. For Amador, not everything in the Isthmus is about the body and nature. She finds it important to speak about the other things, like the constant social violence or the technological exposure, in and on our own land. The clash between the contemporary technological world and her Binnizá traditions form the starting point for approaching technology through her mother-tongue.
Confusion between technology and the possible ways of referring to it in Diidxazá, are part of Bagayaa or Evil Eye, a story that belongs to the series of collection cinematic visuals from Amador’s own creation. The lives of Binnizá women are surrounded by premonitions, dreams with meaning, promises, and knowledge that they have shared from generation to generation with their daughters, friends, or neighbours. Languages maintain their own codes, and the Diidxazá is expressed with its own elements. Within the Binnizá community, there are midwives, village prayer leaders, and women brought as captives by soldiers or mercenaries who stayed to inhabit another language, making it their own over time. All of them are also mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and neighbours who supported each other and learned to defend themselves, to explore the processes of the time, to care for each other and their children, to share a patio in order to weave together.
From her hometown of Juchitán, technology seemed unreachable — or at least only accessible for the rich, for the privileged ones. However, she insisted on appropriating the “master’s tools”. Through neologisms and playing with language, she works by re-writing history, despite the power relationships: to re-write and re-think, any story with the means you have. Paulina performed two powerful readings, intertwining her visual works with popular local technologies such as the megaphone. Paulina and Ana also shaped the workshop Identity through collage together, an exercise between visual materials and the “hearts” or leftover fabrics from the artisanal huipil production — inviting participants to reflect on what it is that shapes identities.
Guenda sicarú
Xigagueta began with a very personal desire to contribute to my community: a tremendous desire to honour my mother, my grandmother, my aunts, and the people, place, and language I come from. It has served as an emotional ray of light that provokes an awakening, reminding us that the creative and reflective activities that inspire can be found anywhere; they don’t need to be called "art" or "poetry." As I mentioned above, in Diidxazá there is no proper word for art. My mother Eva Rasgado might say “guenda sicarú”, among many other ways of phrasing it. It doesn’t matter. It is precisely in this gap — this threshold, between what we understand from our modern education and the embodied experience of other ways of being in the world — that our power lies. This is the space that Xigagueta holds.
That threshold is obscured when the situation of violence is so present and so direct. The romanticised tropical image of the Isthmus is doomed to clash with a reality of systematic inequality, racism, corruption, drug wars, human trafficking, and the devastation left after the disastrous earthquake of 2017. Due to its geography, as the passageway between Central America and North America, between the Pacific and Atlantic Ocean, the circumstances of social vulnerability and violence have been rising. According to data from the Oaxaca State Attorney General's Office, Juchitán is the municipality with the highest rates of armed violence in the state, with an increase in homicides and executions — an average of sixty per month. Next to social structural inequity, this is presumed to be linked to the wave of cartel violence, erupting over transit routes from Chiapas — the same routes followed by migrants who are dubbed as “irregulars” after their entry from Guatemala, thereby becoming targets for organised crime.
During the programme of Xigagueta, my cousin was murdered. Ana's father suffered an attempted kidnapping. At the doors of my family home, funeral processions numbered two or three a day, week in, week out. Any artistic, creative proposal feels insignificant, almost absurd, in such a situation. I include such a direct and personal mention of this situation because it was a heavy companion to the programme. We talked about it many times, sharing all the worry and anxiety we harboured; it snuck into our party. I'd like to think that even so, it didn't ruin it. Xigagueta became a safe haven where we could talk about the issues that worry us, that we understand and that affect us directly. We have to repeat it as much as possible: what matters first is life. The rights to be alive and have a safe decent life.
"We have to repeat it as much as possible: what matters first is life. The rights to be alive and have a safe decent life."
Most of the participants are professionally dedicated to activities other than arts and literature. Elementary school teachers, office work, or nursing are some of their jobs. All of them are brilliant creators, full of powerful thoughts; they have a language full of courage. It has been a great joy for me to put myself at the service of their ideas, to accompany them and help them find the form they desired. If once I found the context of “the arts” a disturbing space, the participants in Xigagueta have restored my wonder and reminded me that wonder and astonishment is everywhere.
How to make room for other methodologies? Which means may be brought to other territories? What is “art” for in a region like el Istmo? What does it mean to be Binnizá here, there, or somewhere else? Our language formed the starting point, as a guardian of secrets and as a tool of strength and emancipation. Texts have been written, in bilingual versions of Diidxazá or Ombeayiüts and in new visual representations of them. Xigagueta seeks to be a support platform for artistic creation in the region. Within the field of the arts, we’re still part of a dynamic centre-periphery; almost all of us who call ourselves artists or cultural workers do so from major cities or state capitals, like Mexico City. This is also the case in the Oaxaca region: artists with any degree of recognition today have made their way from the capital city. On the one hand, artists refer to their places of origin, experiences or cultural background, but in order to develop their careers, they have to distance themselves, to live far from all of that. Centralisation happens at all scales; even in the Isthmus, cultural capital is focussed in Juchitán.
For Xigagueta, our wish as a platform is to support creation with fair compensation, to showcase it first among those close to the region, centring people from the community while at the same time, projecting beyond. In this instance, it was possible with the support and trust of the Nieuwe Instituut and Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo, departing from generous conversations with Eva Rasgado “Binnizá”, Irma Pineda, Lukas Avendaño, Michel Pineda and Victor Fuentes.
Given the social outlook of the region — indeed, the entire country of Mexico — the question of what a programme like Xigagueta can do, and what it means, is one that reverberates frequently in my mind. All that remains is to do, to try to respond with actions filled with love for the land from which we come. To keep persisting, despite everything.
Bio
Eva Posas is a curator, writer, and editor. Her work has evolved at the intersection of curatorial and editorial practices, the politics of language, the power of subtlety, identity, and intergenerational memory as a form of reflection. She is the initiator of Xigagueta, a program of art, writing, and thought from Binnizá territory; the author of Mbuchi: Turtle Words. On Forbidden Mother Tongues, published by PrintRoom in the Netherlands in 2024. Since 2024, she is curator of Resquicio at Casa de Lago, UNAM. She has a background in German Literary and Language studies; additionally, she conducts research and dissemination activities related to Binnizá culture. Interested in collective learning processes, Posas was part of the team behind Materia Abierta from 2019 to 2024. Alongside Mônica Hoff, she co-curated the edition Ni apocalipsis ni paraíso in 2021. From 2020 to 2021, she was selected as a curator in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie and as a fellow at the Nieuwe Instituut from 2022 to 2023. She has collaborated with various institutions in Mexico City, Guatemala, Bogotá, Gateshead, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Basel, Zurich, Berlin, Copenhagen, Venice, Los Angeles, and New York.
Notes
1It’s important to insist on the problematic nature of the word “indigenous”. It implies a category that comes from the Western world, to establish a mark of Otherness. Although it conglomerates similar characteristics on Nations without State, it also dissolves their own diversity. However, some people consider that the term should be embraced as a political category to find commonalities of fight and struggle.
2Written like this, Binnizá refers to the Binnizá people who live in the area of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, who also speak the isthmus variant of Diidxazá. Binnizá are part of the Zapotec People, a Nation spread across Oaxaca State with three more subgroups of Zapotec: the Valleys, the Sierra North and South. Each of these groups have their own language variants as well.
3According to Suely Rotnik, in the Guarani language the word Ñe’é means “soul-word” which involves the soul of the body and any alterations on it project directly on the language in which the body expresses themself.
4Phantom Languages live in the “Dis Place” — the inner space repelling and resisting the aggressive penetrations from the outer space”. When NourbeSe writes about this, she refers directly to the bodies of racialised black women in the Caribbean. “Dis Place – The Space Between” in Philip, M. NourbeSe, Blank: Essays & Interviews. Toronto, Bookthug Press, 2017.
5Bidaani’ in Diidxaza, huipil is the word to refer to the women's blouses from their precolonial garments.
6Covarrubias, Miguel, Mexico South: The Isthmus of Tehuantepec. AA Knopf, 1946.
7Sierra Aida, ‘La creación de un símbolo en La Tehuana.’ in Artes de México, no. 49, 2000, pp. 84-85.
8Translated by Eva Posas, the original line: iAy!, didxazá, didxazá, didx' a rusibani naa, naa nanna zanitilu', dxi initi gubidxacá’Didxazá/ El Zapoteco, by Gabriel López Chiñas. Taken from Máynez, Pilar, Lenguas y literaturas indígenas en el México contemporáneo (PDF), México, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2003 (Serie Totláhtol, Nuestra Palabra 5). www.historicas.unam.mx/publicaciones/publicadigital/libros/414/lenguas_literatura.html
9Palacios Ana, Narrar hilos. México, 2025 (fragment translated by Eva Posas) Unpublished.
