Maya Empire State: Artist Manuel Tzoc Bucup Comes to NY
Artist Manuel Tzoc Bucup in NYC sitting in train car before subway map wearing Maya textile suit from his Piel performance during his residency at Bula Arts & Culture gallery, June 2024. Photo by Manuel Santander.
Artist Manuel Tzoc Bucup standing before East River and World Trade Center wearing Maya textile suit from his Piel performance during his residency at Bula Arts & Culture gallery, June 2024. Photo by Manuel Morillo Orozco.
Artist Manuel Tzoc Bucup in NYC standing in Times Square wearing Maya textile suit from his Piel performance during his residency at Bula Arts & Culture gallery, June 2024. Photo by Manuel Santander.
It has been a year since queer Maya K’iche’ poet, visual, and performance artist Manuel Gabriel Tzoc Bucup visited New York from Guatemala. He gave of himself in the streets and the gallery. A small group of Central Americans here gathered and watched and hung out with him in honor of the events. It has not been forgotten. It was recorded many ways—this here another record.
Tzoc participated in an Abya Yala poetry marathon on Facebook during the first year of the COVID pandemic, reading from a small room in Guatemala. That was the first I saw of him. That time brought so many worlds of writers together through the screens. There he read with Indigenous writers from all over the Americas over the course of many hours. Tzoc was immediately enthralling and urgent.
The next year of that apocalypse he was part of a series of online readings curated by Tierra Narrative, a Central American film and poetry collective, for The Poetry Project, the downtown New York poetry venue. The Central American diaspora was connecting in these end times as well, descendants of many such eras, and I was learning of poets I could only imagine.
I first saw the ancient Maya city of Copán in my family’s homeland of Honduras as a teenager and was captivated, as most are, by the majesty and mystery of what the ancestors left. What you quickly learn as an amateur Mayanist is that although the Maya created the first writing system of the Americas, there are no books save four in the world, most which the Spanish destroyed, heathen documents to the Christian colonizers. What was left of the amate bark paper accordion texts of the ancestors was destroyed by the rainforests, the humidity of the tropical Maya region, southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador. As a child in school in the U.S., you learn that, like the books, the Maya themselves are gone. I remember them as a few sentences in a history class, a page in an art history book. It has been an adulthood of dispelling myths, looking for lost books, learning forgotten language, seeking people who are very alive, who we should know.
“What was left of the amate bark paper accordion texts of the ancestors was destroyed by the rainforests, the humidity of the tropical Maya region, southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador. ”
It was Rosa Chavez Tijax, Tzoc’s sister poet, a widely honored Maya K’iche’ and Kaqchikel activist and poet who writes of survival and community, who let me know he was coming to New York. Based in Guatemala and working and writing steadily for most of the 21st century, they are both major contributors to the reestablishment of Maya literature. They were born in the early ’80s in the middle of a more than 30-year war in Guatemala and the genocide of many Maya groups. As I learned of Copán in my teens in the ’80s so did I learn of the decimation of the modern Maya. I now witness this generation of poets opening paths, claiming, existing in never-before-seen ways. I saw Chavez in person for the first time as the keynote speaker at what was probably the first Central American studies conference on the east coast at Yale in April 2024.
Tzoc was in residence at Bula Arts & Culture, a small gallery in an apartment in Woodside, Queens, focused on Guatemalan art. Bula collaborated with Galería Casa del Mango in Antigua throughout the pandemic to bring Guatemalan art to New York, calling the transnational effort “Bula Meets Mango / Collectors Wall: From Guatemala to Queens, New York.” For Tzoc, the organizations hosted a series of events around his work that included an exhibition, a performance in a public plaza, and a performative reading at the gallery.
I took the 7 train to 103rd St-Corona Plaza on the last day of May 2024, a Friday. Day laborers from Central and South America were decompressing here after work, staring out blankly or at their phones. Pigeons were holding court in the middle of the plaza between the benches. A dozen or so bystanders were aware of the performance about to take place. A child played chasing the pigeons, an opening act. Tzoc silently made a stage of the plaza, all in black, a hoodie, a sheer button-down shirt, slacks, sneakers, a slender brown man standing before the crowd of Latin America’s Indigenous exhausted in the grinding city. He placed a suit made from Maya textiles on the ground at one end of the circle of the plaza. He inherited the fabric from his mother Micaela Bucup who passed away eight years ago. He walked to a point across from it and then ever so slowly back toward the suit, stripping himself of his black clothes, a bodily mourning. The pigeons understood and cleared out entirely as Tzoc began walking. A few photographers and videographers surrounded him, recording every step, the ritual announcing itself.
Artist Manuel Tzoc Bucup standing in Corona Plaza, Queens, NY, wearing Maya textile suit during his Piel performance for "Bula meets Mango," collaborative art events by Bula Arts & Culture gallery, Queens, NY, and Galería Casa del Mango, Antigua, Guatemala, May 31, 2024. Photo by Manuel Morillo Orozco.
Over the course of about 45 minutes, everyone was mesmerized, the people on benches, standing about the circle, above the plaza on the staircase of the elevated train. I watched them as I watched Tzoc. They were enthralled and puzzled. We all lifted our phones at various points, taking pictures, recording, Tzoc making us all visual artists. One man in the crowd near me on a bench had been on the phone talking to someone else most of the time but the conversation had turned to a small play-by-play of what he was watching. “Tradición,” he said to the person on the other end of the line as Tzoc walked. As he stripped further, there were quite a few appalled. He was naked when he got to the suit. “¿Qué es eso?” a woman exclaimed.
He put on the suit deliberately, a woven purple, pink, and green, plaid-like cotton with attached gloves, full mask, and head covering. He stood tall and still, taking in the energy of the suit and the eyes of the crowd. Someone whispered, “Spider-Man.” The photographers and camera people worked and captured as he adjusted and lived in his new skin. Tzoc was becoming a glyph in his mother’s fabrics. The textured silhouette became an ancestral expression present day, a record of life embodied, silently demanding to be seen, spoken of, remembered. He reached for the ground, first on all fours, then curled into himself there. The suit seemed a kind of protection, at the very least from the pigeon droppings everywhere.
After some moments, he got back up, took his time, stood again. Behind the mask of the suit, he walked back along the same invisible line in the middle of the circle. The 7 train coming and going and the voices of an evangelical pastor and choir nearby the plaza were the soundtrack of this leg. Tzoc’s silence took on a defiant quality in that body wrapped in Maya fabric walking against the church noise. It was nearly an hour of spectacle in this ritual field he had made, a kind of fashion and heroism part of the conversation with the past. The performance, called Piel/Skin, was a reclaiming of his family’s traditional cloth, its meaning and attachment to the people stripped and sold, commodified by tourist culture.
“Tzoc’s silence took on a defiant quality in that body wrapped in Maya fabric walking against the church noise.”
The photographers, the onlookers who learned of the performance from Bula’s social media, Tzoc, and the gallerists, including Manuel Morillo Orozco of Mango and Gabriela Alvarez Castañeda of Bula, gathered to move back to the gallery for an afterparty. Before I left to join them, I asked a man next to me on the bench a few questions. He was one of the many surprised by the performance, audibly gasping often. He told me he was from Ecuador. I asked what he thought this was and he responded, “No se pero tiene buen equipo, es algo serio.” (“I don’t know but he has a good team, it must be serious.”) The documenters working while Tzoc stripped and re-dressed made him pay attention. He figured he was some kind of star.
The gallery was a few train stops back from the plaza. It was filled with Tzoc’s book objects like installation art and photographs of his previous public performances, multimedia pieces of his own creation with support from designers, publishers, and photographers. I had missed the opening of this exhibition the week before but was able to observe it all this night, drinking among his art. On the walls was Origen y Herida, (Origin and Wound), a photographic record of five performances he had done previously, including the first iteration of Piel in a plaza in Guatemala City in 2016. His other performances include a reimagining of Indigeneity of the Americas intertwined with queerness ("La Refundación de Abya Yala"), explorations of his relationship to his father ("Memoria en Blanco"), the meaning of his name ("Moler el Olvido / Amasar la Sangre"), and water as metaphor ("Sueños debajo del Ya'"). The intersectionality and intimacy apparent in the work addresses “the deep colonial wound of racism,” as described in the exhibition statement, a consistent confrontation and recreation. He makes a place for himself and who he is from in his performances, resisting centuries-long erasure.
The exhibition also included Objeto y Palabra / Lenguaje y Artefacto: Cuerpos Móviles, )Object and Word / Language and Artifact: Mobile Bodies), a collection of five book projects by Tzoc. The gallery is a fitting home for these ideas that begin with books and concrete poetry. Atómico is a series of word sculptures, letters on disks with slots that connect to the other, fluid and game-like, “each letter . . . an atom.” Polen is a pill bottle as a book, each pill storing a poem. They’re “extremely depressive texts,” Tzoc warns us, pills about depression rather than for them. Wuj is the Maya word for book and here a book of loose pages, each page centered on a word, the words threads, a dictionary reconsidered. In the gallery, they appeared on a clothesline, pages hanging like fabrics. Pequeña voz, a small accordion book, most immediately recalls the shape of the lost books of the Maya, a “mini-codex” with a word on each panel. These ingenious texts break down language, make it tactile. They play and talk back to ancients of a few hemispheres, of poetry and blood, Apollinaire, the Maya, creators and recreators of signs. Tzoc, a new sign maker with endless, dizzying approaches to the word.
At Bula a week later, Tzoc closed out his residency with a reading of what he called “expanded poetry,” titled Queride Internet. Before the reading got going, we could watch how Piel had expanded during the week in the city. The suit he wore now hung on the wall along with a time-lapse film of him standing tall and still in it. Maya Spidey had touched many corners of New York, all the city moving around him, on the Brooklyn Bridge, in Times Square, at the Promenade, on an elevated train platform, before the East River, the Maya empire state. I saw in it what I think of as a Maya impulse to put a stamp on the world, to raise cities from words and image, an Indigenous creation impulse.
Artist Manuel Tzoc Bucup during his poetry performance Queride Internet holding up sign to face audience at Bula Arts & Culture gallery in Woodside, Queens, June 8, 2024. Photo by Hassen Somarriba @hassgua IG
He began his performance this last night at a table like an altar, as if about to conduct a séance. He picked up a light box sign with a variation of the reading title of the “Queridx Internet” and a heart emoji in theater marquee letters. He stepped out from behind the table and approached many of the audience members with the sign like a screen between them, a phone, a computer, as we are so used to seeing each other now. I thought of how I first knew of him on a COVID Zoom screen. It remains odd to be in person, to exist and meet in real life, how much of our lives now seem marked by illusion. I took pictures of him in my face with his screen, battling back with my phone, relaying that I am equally deranged, estranged by the screen. He let it go and read to us of that derangement, that separation, the longing behind it. He bowed to the altar in his black skirt splayed out on the floor, the back of his jacket embroidered with a glittery jaguar shimmering. He delivered his script of spoken word pieces, addressing “San Google” and “Alexa,” marching, shimmying in combat boots before us, declaiming discomforts, “Estoy desvelado y tengo pánico bancario por las fake news y esta fiesta de espuma que se acumula en todo mi cerebro no me deja sentir ni pensar necesito posicionar anatómicamente el dolor y el vacío en el hueso frontal de mi rostro.” (“I haven’t slept and am having a banking panic because of fake news and this foam party that's building up in my brain doesn't let me feel or think. I need to anatomically position the pain and emptiness in the frontal bone of my face.”)
He read from Gay(o), one of his many non-object books, among them, El ebrio mar y yo, a Rimbaud homage, and Esc(o)poetas para una muerte en versos b…ala, his first book originally published in 2006, also available at the gallery. He was here May into June, in time to share and partake in the hot pride month, here for the “locashuecosmorrosmariconesjotosmariposashomosexualesputospuñaleschupapollasgaysyedemas.” He ranted and released, “para que nos dejen de manchar la consciencia y nos dejen de joder, que nos dejen de joder ese sistema de mierda todos ellos ellas y elles y a mi nos detecta el gigante radar gay que ha llegado desde el bar ‘Las Estrellas’ en la Zona 1 por supuesta y nos deja un mensaje en la pantalla AMARSE ENTRE IGUALES NUNCA FUE DIFERENTE!” (“so that they stop staining our conscience and stop screwing us that shitty system stop screwing us all of them and me are detected by the giant gay radar that came from the bar 'Las Estrellas' in Zone 1 of course and leaves us a message on the screen: LOVING EQUALS WAS NEVER DIFFERENT!)
Artist Manuel Tzoc Bucup during his poetry performance Queride Internet holding sign to woman's face at Bula Arts & Culture gallery in Woodside, Queens, June 8, 2024. Photo by Hassen Somarriba.
The reading was a mashup of his previous works, a time to be loud, give voice after several silent visual gatherings. His performance in the street the week before, wordless, all body and ritual, somber and transgressive. At the reading, a very contemporary Maya, caught in the gaze, the tricks of the screen, in the body and its concerns, delusion and desire. With ease, Tzoc’s work includes the ancestral and the present day, grasps at memory and current conditions. He creates a tactile poetry rooted in the body, confronting invisibility, of the gay, of the native, embracing the word and abandoning it.
At one of the afterparties for these events, I began to shake off some words, some wounds, when the gallery owner asked if I was Guatemalan. She figured I wasn’t because Guatemalans don’t dance, she said. I had heard that before, from a Guatemalan, too. Hondurans do dance, but then Tzoc and a friend came up and shook some before me, warming up for another night of pride celebrations in Queens; we all shook it, for those who don’t.
