Recuperation as Decolonial Practice

Marlon Jiménez Oviedo

“There cannot be discourse about decolonization, a theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice.”

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácticas y discursos Descolonizadores, p. 62 (translation mine)

Introduction

The picture above shows the artistic group Non Cuanxa. All of its members are mask-makers, diablitos, and Indigenous Boruca men. The picture was taken in 2018, in the Indigenous territory of Boruca, which is located in the southern region of Costa Rica. The group had just finished putting on the costumes and masks that they had made for that year’s three-day Juego de los Diablitos (Game of the Little Devils) festival, after which they proceeded to get their photograph taken to document their artistry. Soon thereafter, the whole group walked to the town center to participate in the Juego de los Diablitos. This festival is an ancestral Boruca tradition that began in colonial times and involves the diablitos contending for three days with the figure of a bull, which is representative of the Spanish conquistadors. The Non Cuanxa displayed in the picture have played a key role in transforming the tradition of the Juego de los Diablitos in Boruca. Forming in 2009, the group has revived and renewed Boruca ancestral dressing and mask-making to encompass Boruca myths, stories, and spirits that were in danger of being forgotten. The group’s name, Non Cuanxa, means “monkey’s tail” and was inspired by the symbol of a spiral found on a rock in their territory. They now paint this symbol on their bodies and masks. In addition to participating in the annual three-day festival, the group also stages theatrical performances of these ancestral stories and myths in other contexts throughout the year. Their work recuperates oral, visual, and spiritual elements from the past to connect the present-day Boruca people to their ancestors and spirits, and to weave their artistic practice into the communal efforts to strengthen Boruca’s political sovereignty and economic stability.

I use the term “recuperation” in this essay to refer to a decolonial performance tactic, which I learned by collaborating with the Non Cuanxa. This decolonial tactic uses performance to bring back the past into the present, without relying on a romanticized attachment to the purity or givenness of the past. Recuperation, as a decolonial practice, commits to the imagining and performing of something that occurred in the past, but it does so by utilizing a creative freedom to change how it is perceived, felt, or remembered. In so doing, it opens new courses of action that are informed or inspired by the new perspectives on the past. This orientation to encountering the past through performance lives both in explicitly artistic traditions and in community organizing efforts around economic and social life. Both in daily life and in artmaking, recuperation aims to repair the effects of coloniality by rebuilding and cultivating Boruca Indigenous knowledge and practices, without positing a need to return to or mimic pre-colonial times. Rather, recuperation seeks to innovate, to embody things of the past with new perspectives, to make them relevant for the circumstances of the present, and the future.

Recuperation relies on the existence of cultural traces that are passed down through generations. Thus, the recuperation of Indigenous worlds relies on cultural traditions that have survived colonialism, in what Diana Taylor refers to as the paradoxical “multicodedness” of performance. This refers to the reproduction and transfer of precolonial Indigenous spiritual traditions and knowledge within “the very symbolic system designed to eliminate them: Roman Catholicism” (44). In the case of the Non Cuanxa and the tradition of the Juego de los Diablitos, the practice takes the Christian figure of the devil, which was initially used to demonize and eradicate Indigenous ritual performances, and uses it to symbolically defeat the bull in a three-day ritual. In the Boruca Indigenous language, the diablitos are called the Kabru Rojc. The Non Cuanxa’s recuperation practice uses oral, visual, and performance practices transmitted by their ancestors to innovate how the Kabru Rojc, or diablitos as they are most commonly referred to, are understood by the Boruca community. In other words, the Non Cuanxa use the potential of multicoded meaning of their ancestors’ traditions to expand what it means to be a diablito in the present. The practice of recuperation facilitates communal healing from the discursive grip of the terms of coloniality that have defined the Boruca people and their knowledge as inferior, evil, savage, and not worthy of remembrance.

The Terms of (De)Coloniality

Coloniality/modernity is defined as the world system that began with the European conquest of the Americas. As Walter Mignolo states, coloniality is the hidden side of modernity, hence the dual term coloniality/modernity; it was established through the gradual differentiation and hierarchization of people on the axes of race, gender, and labor exploitation through processes of capitalism (Mignolo and Walsh). Coloniality—used in short for coloniality/modernity—values the illusion of the independent individual, the accumulation of wealth, and the domination of those deemed inferior through racialization, gender oppression and ableism, as well as domination of non-human species in general. These oppressive structures are founded and maintained through a cosmology of Eurocentric binaries and hierarchization, establishing the grand metaphors of Nature vs. Human, Rational vs. Savage, and Man vs. Other, which are used to construct institutions and their ideological apparatuses. The cosmology of coloniality outlived colonialism, as decolonization movements fighting for independence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—beginning in the Americas—did not dismantle colonial paradigms but only disputed the external management of the system by Imperial powers. Thus, processes of decolonization that occurred through independence revolutions and wars in the Americas instituted internal colonialism with the creation of nation-states that reproduced oppression in governance and economic institutions under the axes of gender, race, and class. Decoloniality, as a praxis of delinking from the Eurocentric system, as well as cultivating and living in more harmonious ways with others and with the planet, has existed from the very outset of colonial projects. Decolonial praxes have varied across time periods and cultures, but they share the impetus not only to resist colonialism but also to safeguard, propose, and build viable alternatives to coloniality (Mignolo and Walsh).

The Eurocentric model of coloniality is premised on what Sylvia Wynter refers to as the overrepresentation of Man in all economic, political, and cultural institutions—the privileging of the White, cisheterosexual, able-bodied, property-owning man as the universal Human. From the sixteenth century onwards, the gradual creation of Man as the ruler of all life necessitated the creation of the Other, less ideal, human. As Wynter argues, “the ‘Indians’ were portrayed as the very acme of the savage, irrational Other, [and] the ‘Negroes’ were assimilated to the former’s category, represented as its most extreme form and as the ostensible missing link between rational humans and irrational animals” (266). Decoloniality includes a psychosocial healing, or delinking, from those terms that have been used to organize the state and economic markets in the service of the elites, those closer to the figure of Man. As Afro-Colombian artist and theorist Adolfo Albán Achinte writes:

I understand decoloniality as the process by which we recognize other histories, trajectories and ways of being in the world that are different from the rational logics of capitalist cultural expression (Jameson 1995, Zizec 1998). This process humanizes existence by returning the dignity to those who, by the forceful hegemonic modern/colonial project, were deemed inferior or not-human. (11)

Decoloniality is thus not a reactionary revolution that aims to take control of the system; it does not attempt to defend life under the terms of progress or any other notions established by colonizing institutions. As Mignolo and Walsh argue, the “epistemic and emotional (and aesthetic) delinking means conceiving of and creating institutional organizations that are at the service of life and do not–as in the current state of affairs–put people at the service of institutions” (126). Decolonial practices must not become a metaphor, as Tuck and Yang outline in their work, because true decolonization must include the repatriation of lands to Indigenous communities, and the granting of political sovereignty, which Indigenous communities such as the Boruca are demanding. However, a decolonial practice “focuses on changing the terms of the conversation” (Mignolo and Walsh, 131). Any system of life that operates outside nation-states, extractive economic growth, and international agreements that defend war and death for the benefit of the global elites is relentlessly framed by coloniality as impossible and unknowable. Decoloniality requires a discursive and aesthetic delinking from this imagined and constructed system that presents a significant threat to planetary life. The process of delinking from coloniality, as Arturo Escobar articulates, requires that we “approach the spaces that might reveal the existence of other worlds — other forms of knowing-doing-being, with no separation among these — in which the real and the possible are conceived differently” (13). Thus, decolonial praxes include the dismantling of the historical, material, and structural inequality of current nation-states. Moreover, decolonial praxes also aim to support the exploration and cultivation of other ways of life, which have historically been marked as inferior, irrational, or primitive, but which offer alternative ways of knowing the world, and of doing and being with ourselves and each other outside the constraint of domination as the only possible form of sociality.

Anthropologist Riga Segato has outlined that, for Indigenous people, this creative process of delinking begins with the “liberation of the intercepted and canceled historical projects of the peoples intervened by the pattern of coloniality–societies formerly dominated that now can see a ‘return of the future’” (59). To be able to build their own Indigenous futures, Indigenous communities need to experience what Escobar describes as the autonomy to find solutions from the inside out, as part of their own cultural evolution and not as an imposition (39). I use the term recuperation in this essay to refer to creative practices that Indigenous people use to reconnect with their historical pasts and cultivate a return of their autochthonous futures. Recuperation practices are not about returning to the past; rather, they are about embodying the past in renewed ways, with the freedom to evolve from within historical Indigenous continuities.

Recuperation in artistic, ritual, and everyday spaces conceptualizes Indigenous cultural practices not as forms of folklore that are stuck in the past, but rather as forms of connection to forcefully intervened historical projects. As Fernando Huanacuni Mamani explains with regard to Andean cultures, “until the end of the 70s and the 80s we were the example [of exclusionary nation-states] because we adorned the spaces for tourists and did not participate in the political sphere of our countries, because we just made folklore. Nevertheless, after 500 years we went from resistance to proposing new paradigms and actions” (7). Recuperation is one step beyond resistance. It is, instead, a step toward what Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson articulates as “flourishment of the Indigenous inside” (17). She explains how she went a step beyond resistance, in thinking from a Canadian First Nations perspective, after reading Taiaiake Alfred’s work:

… he refocuses our work from trying to transform the colonial outside into a flourishment of the Indigenous inside. We need to rebuild our culturally inherent philosophical contexts for governance, education, healthcare, and economy. We need to be able to articulate in a clear manner our visions for the future, for living as Indigenous Peoples in contemporary times. To do so, we need to engage in Indigenous processes, since according to our traditions, the processes of engagement highly influence the outcome of the engagement itself. We need to do this on our own terms, without the sanction, permission or engagement of the state, western theory or the opinions of Canadians. (17)

Recuperation practices thus seek to restructure organizations to enable Indigenous peoples to live and create as contemporaries or, in other words, to have the power not only to resist coloniality, but also to shape the world system from within their own recuperated pasts. Recuperation does not seek to be free from the influence from other cultures, but rather to be free of the domination from one hegemonic one.

Recuperation from the Inside Out: A Boruca Case Study

In the remainder of this essay, I examine how the Boruca artistic group Non Cuanxa has developed a decolonial practice of recuperation, within the Boruca tradition of the Juego de los Diablitos. Such a practice is intended to cultivate an autonomous decolonial project that delinks the Boruca from the colonial aesthetic grip of Catholicism and the economic capitalist model of extraction to reconnect the community with Boruca spiritual and artistic practices. The Boruca community works year-round to organize a three-day display of intricate masks and a dangerous game of physical confrontation between the diablitos or diablos and the figure of the bull, from Dec 31^st to Jan 2^nd. During the game, the bull charges at the diablos, while everyone—including spectators—walks from house yard to house yard in a predetermined route around the community. Any Boruca male from the region can play a diablo, providing they have an appropriate Boruca mask and costume, but only a select group can play the bull, as it requires significant strength and agility to carry the heavy bull costume/puppet and charge at the diablitos with its wooden head. Boruca people openly explain to visitors that the bull symbolizes the Spanish colonizers, whereas the diablitos who fight the bull and burn it at the end of the third day represent Indigenous resistance against the long-lasting structures of colonization—from the conquest to the present. Chago, one of the members of the Non Cuanxa, described the juego as follows:

The Kabru Rojc festival that we do is in honor of the war against the Spaniards, it’s like recovering and giving honor to our ancestors… We say that, historically, all the other Indigenous groups lost against the Spaniards, but not our people. We defeated the Spaniards in many battles. Conquest happened because they were very intelligent and came with gifts, so that’s how they conquered us. But in battle, we won. That’s why we do the festival every year, to celebrate that. (Personal interview, December 2021) ^[1]

With bravado, the Juego de los Diablitos portrays the warriors who resisted conquest in the southern mountains of Talamanca, which the Spanish were not able to explore or colonize until the seventeenth century owing to an armed Indigenous resistance. The town of Concepción de Boruca was established only in the mid-seventeenth century by Franciscan missionaries after the Spanish had gained control of the South Pacific coast. At the time, Boruca was populated by Indigenous people from the Quepo, Borucaca, Coto, Turucaca, and Abubaes ethnic groups. The Franciscans built a church and established a politico-economic system of tribute to, in the words of the Spaniards, pacify the Indians (Campos Chavarría). The process of colonization and forced assimilation over the course of many years had tragic consequences. For instance, although many present-day Boruca people have some knowledge of words and basic sentences in their language, the language of their daily lives and education is Spanish. Nevertheless, to this day, Boruca continues to stage resistance to the destruction of the cultural practices that they have safeguarded.

The internal movement to recuperate and strengthen the Boruca’s cosmovision, political governance, and economic sustainability has been growing over the past few decades. In 2019, Boruca became the first Indigenous territory in Costa Rica to officially establish a process of legal consultation, by collaborating with the government to create a linking body between their Indigenous community and the Costa Rican state. The aim of such a consultation is to allow the Boruca people to have a more informed say in political and economic projects, and in any decision that may affect their territory (Ministerio de Justicia y Paz de Costa Rica). The sense of pride and bravado displayed during the performance by the diablitos extends beyond the game into Boruca social life. When I first arrived at Boruca, a Boruca leader named Grace intercepted me and a few others as she was heading home. She was carrying her grandson on her shoulders, and immediately after greeting us, she started telling us how angry she was that officials from SINAC (Sistema Nacional de Áreas de Conservación or National System of Conservation Areas) had halted construction in the plaza in front of the community building, because the organizing committee did not have the required permits. The construction was part of the preparations for the festival that would start the next day. Grace was angry, because the Boruca community are, by law, the managers of the land. She complained that, usually, when these officials are alerted that there are people engaging in illegal hunting in the area, they never seem to appear to fulfill their official duties in a timely fashion. However, that day, they were present and enforced the law much more quickly than usual. Once we arrived at her house, we were introduced to several men who were in the shop area carving and polishing their diablito masks. Grace told them what had just occurred. Her brother subsequently joked how great it would be to put on the masks and scare these officials. Everyone laughed, and he added, “Turds would fly!” Everyone laughed again at the thought of the diablitos scaring away government officials with feces. I tell this story to highlight how the diablito energy of rebellion, protection, mischief, and pride, which has been cultivated and passed down in the performance of the Juego de los Diablitos, is a cultural trait present in daily life in Boruca.

The transformations within the performance tradition of the Juego de los Diablitos impact and reflect social life in Boruca. Non Cuanxa’s work, for instance, exemplifies the potential of recuperation performance practices to revive autochthonous cultural codes, spirituality, and identity. Through their work, the Non Cuanxa have helped the Boruca people to construct renewed terms for their identity in the present and to find new courses of action rooted in their own cultural evolution.

Recuperation: Bringing Back the Past into the Present

The first three members of Non Cuanxa were Melo, Kamel, and Galeo. In 2009, they began discussing the fact that the juego was being played without the cultural and spiritual connection that they thought it deserved. During the interviews that I conducted in 2021, Kamel recounted, “Ten or maybe fifteen years ago, we were losing what I call the spiritual material of the Brunkas [Brunkas is the word in their Indigenous language to refer to the Boruca people], our own belief systems were taboo for many people. Painting ourselves and representing spirits that other religions came to replace, was challenging” (personal interview, December 2021). Galeo explained that the group’s initial motivation had been a desire to “represent something of our own, different from what had been done before. Not to go out of the cultural tradition [the Juego de los Diablitos], but to revitalize that cultural form with other more mythical characters from Brunka legends and traditions” (personal interview, December 2021). Both Kamel and Galeo posited the need to reignite the spiritual aspects of the Juego de los Diablitos and the Boruca culture more widely to recuperate what had slowly been disappearing.

Recuperation, however, did not appear to be an attempt to return to the past; instead, the Non Cuanxa used performance to incorporate the past into the present through artistic innovation. Galeo, Kamel, and Melo had been on a journey to safeguard and advance their cultural traditions from a young age, influenced by the tutelage of Don Ismael Gonzales, the father of Melo and Kamel. Before the 1970s, Don Ismael Gonzales was one of only a few elders in the Boruca community who still made masks, as documented by anthropologist Pamela Campos Chavarría in her work. She cites Margarita Rojas Morales, Ismael’s wife, who remembered how “Ismael hid to make masks because people saw it as wrong, they said he was lazy, they did not understand why he did that” (87). Before the 1990s, when subsistence agriculture was the main industry in town, most Boruca families had relatives who had had to leave the community to earn more income. There were also high rates of people dropping out of school at an early age to work and often they sought work outside Boruca (Campos Chavarría). The system of cultural and economic marginalization, that Boruca had experienced for centuries, had produced disdain for Indigenous practices that could not be monetized. Making masks, which were not sold at the time, was seen by many as a useless pastime for lazy individuals.

In the 1990s, Don Ismael Gonzales decided to seek help to recuperate the practice of mask-making, despite perceptions of it being something useless. He sought funding from independent groups of artists and governmental organizations, and taught mask-making to a group of adolescents, forming a workshop called Rabrü. Galeo explains that, for Don Ismael, the practice of teaching mask-making included educating the younger generation about spirits, animals, and Boruca legends, as a way to explore Boruca spirituality through artistic creation. Slowly, the youth who formed Rabrü began to innovate the process of mask-making. After taking painting lessons with a visual artist in San José, Costa Rica’s capital, the Rabrü started painting the masks with intricate colorful styles. Eventually, this trend established what are now considered traditional Boruca masks, which are sold as art pieces and souvenirs all over Costa Rica. As the group slowly began making money from selling masks, the Boruca people’s perception of mask-making, and the festival at large, also changed. When anthropologist Pamela Campos Chavarría conducted her fieldwork from 2007 to 2017, she identified at least 151 people who participated in the production of saleable Boruca masks, in either part-time or full-time roles. Mask-making provided the community with a new economic practice and reinvigorated the community socially.

The economic boom of mask-making was not without its internal community problems, however. The commodification of the masks has led some Boruca people to take up mask-making simply for profit, whereby they produce more generic masks in less time and without much interest in their connection to Boruca spirituality. As Néstor García Canclini has argued, it is not sufficient to save Indigenous myths, crafts, and fiestas from disappearing, because under the capitalist system, the hegemonic culture ends up appropriating these cultural practices into the national culture, thereby alienating the symbolic power from the local artists (García Canclini, 161). Taking control of the symbolism and the means of production are both necessary to ground practices of recuperation, as in the workshop started by Don Ismael Gonzales.

The practice of recuperation that was later developed by the Non Cuanxa aims not only to strengthen the practice of mask-making among the Boruca, but also to use their inherited symbolic systems to deepen Boruca spirituality and identity, thereby helping to formulate an autonomous cultural evolution in their community. Melo, Kamel, and Galeo understand this longer-term trajectory and the efforts to recuperate Boruca spirituality and, hence, they see the Juego de los Diablitos as the transmission of cultural values and a prideful remembrance of Boruca ancestors who resisted colonization. However, they understand that multiple meanings can coexist in performance, and that the tradition can also be turned into a spectacle for marketing and selling masks, solely to make a profit. In response to the dangers of commercialization for profit’s sake, from 2009, the group has constructed an aesthetic intervention to bring back the past into the present as a means to connect with the spiritual aspects of their culture and to delink it from a categorization of Boruca knowledge and practices as useless or best forgotten.

The first action of what would become their aesthetic intervention and decolonial practice happened in 2009. Melo, Kamel, and Galeo decided to represent the spirit of Cuasrán during the festival. Cuasrán is considered the protector of Boruca, and a mountain was named after him within the Boruca territory. This spirit was once a Boruca man who, after sensing the imminent colonization of his people, fled into the mountain forest to live a life free of domination. He is said to have convinced some people to go with him, and his spirit comes down the mountain every year for the festival and mixes with the masked diablitos to celebrate successful resistance against colonization. According to Kamel, one of the elders had embodied the spirit of Cuasrán during the festival before, but it had become somewhat of a humorous character and was not performed with the respect it deserved. Kamel commented that he imagined that the elder had some shame towards Boruca spirituality, given the impact of the Catholic religion on the ways the community related to their mystical beings and spirituality. Thus his performance did not fully honor Cuasrán as a real and powerful spirit. Before the 1970s, the diablitos, as Campos Chavarría explains, were perceived as rowdy, mischievous, and unpredictable, to the extent that some of the families closed their houses so that the diablitos would not break something or steal food during the festival (Campos Chavarría). Kamel recounts an older characterization of the role of Cuasrán during the festival with an attitude of mockery and mischief that is more closely associated with a Catholic understanding of the Kabru Rojc as devilish figures. Non Cuanxa’s interpretation, in contrast, aimed to position Cuasrán and the diablitos as prideful warrior ancestors who protected both their people and their culture.

The three founding members of Non Cuanxa thus questioned how they could best present Cuasrán to the community, because although some would argue that Cuasrán was an older man, others would say that he was a young man, or that he appeared as an animal. Others still would say that he was just a spirit. For Kamel, the work was in “closing one’s eyes and opening the spirit and the soul, to think beyond the present, because we cannot represent an epoch in a way that we see it right now. We had to ‘tell the mind’ that this was a closed jungle five hundred years ago…” (personal communication, December 2021). Kamel outlines the use of imagination to visualize the past and bring it into the present, so that the community can understand the spiritual aspects of the festival in a renewed way. Thus, the Non Cuanxa decided to dress in loincloths rather than the full-body sacks now used as traditional diablito costumes. This decision was made as a gesture to honor their ancestors by observing how they would have dressed during the battles against the Spanish. In that first year, Melo embodied Cuasrán, wearing a mask of his own design and a loincloth during the Juego de los Diablitos. By recuperating a form of ancestral dress and the prideful embodiment of Cuasrán as a spiritual figure from the past, the Non Cuanxa instigated their process of encouraging the Boruca community to shift their understanding of the diablitos. Encountering the past in this renewed way began opening communal possibilities to reconnect with the Boruca’s non-Christian spirituality.

In the festival of the following year, a few others joined the Non Cuanxa in wearing loincloths. Galeo told a story that reflects the ways their recuperation work started being received by the community:

When they looked at Saul for the first time, dressed in a loincloth of leather and a tail, he was representing the river spirit, named the Di Sujcra, with his fish. We were surprised when he walked with us in his role, and various older women started saying: look here comes Di Sujcra, how beautiful, he is the one from the legends! That really touched me, I felt very excited because they recognized the character that we had given Saul, so we weren’t so lost. We were on to something real in Boruca, because the whole town saw it that way. (Personal communication, December 2021)

Melo characterizes the group’s work as “a vitamin of art, culture and ancestrality… because the characters that have been explored, for many, had disappeared. Thus we gave them life. With great joy and this opportunity, we have had, the Boruca community has taken a significant turn back to find the reality that belongs to us” (personal communication, December 2021). In Non Cuanxa’s recuperation work, encountering the past opens up a space in which the Boruca people can find their own reality, by means of a communal aesthetic practice that feels like it belongs to them and is not imposed from the outside.

The Impact of Performing the Past

The picture above was taken in 2022 and depicts two members of Non Cuanxa coming face to face with the bull in a moment of confrontation, a point at which the bull may decide to lift up its head and strike the diablitos with its heavy mask at the front of the puppet/costume. Those who play the bull delight in successfully breaking adiablito mask, but this rarely happens because, although the diablitos are daring, they are also quick to move out of the way of the charging bull. Although all kinds of diablos contend with the bull during the three-day festival, in this picture, the two Non Cuanxa members stand out from the others who are fully covered in clothes and leaves. The Non Cuanxa are wearing loincloths and body paint, and one of them holds a spear. Each year, this mode of dressing is becoming increasingly popular for the diablitos during the festival, even those who do not officially belong to Non Cuanxa.

Initially, the Non Cuanxa had been criticized for what some Boruca people described as excessive nudity. During an interview, Chago commented: “Many people say, they just dress like that to get attention. But no. We try to recuperate myths, stories and spirits that had almost been forgotten and bring them to the present. That is what attracted me to the group, their way of dressing and what they reflected about our culture” (personal interview, December 2021). To dress only with a loincloth, as their ancestors did, requires the courage to step out of habitual forms of dress and embodiment in the name of resembling Boruca ancestors. Joel, another younger member of the group, stated that when Kamel first talked to him about joining the group, he told him that he would think about it. He explained his reservation as follows:

Joel: Appearing semi-naked. It is not every day that one walks around like that. That was what made me hesitate… What are people going to say? Even my mother, what is she going to think? Or my family… But after talking to Kamel, I decided to do it.

Me: But did you have a desire to join the group?

Joel: Yes, actually yes… Many of my friends appeared with the Non Cuanxa, so I wanted to participate with them…

Me: And what about what the group did attracted you?

Joel: The fact that they always brought a story. And I would say? Where does it come from? Where and when did that happen? Or, how strange that I had never heard of that story before. And that was interesting to me at the time, the amount of stories… And I would say, where have I been that I didn’t know about them?

…

Joel: Later I interpreted another character that Kamel gave me, corn’s child…It became the character that made me really join the group for good… Corn’s child is a being that we make the drink [chicha] from… I liked that character; it was very recognized here by the elders. In fact, people would call me corn’s child when I went around the community and everything.

To dress similarly to their Boruca ancestors required the members of Non Cuanxa to overcome feelings of embarrassment about appearing semi-naked in front of spectators. Despite the initial resistance of some community members, the Non Cuanxa developed a highly virtuosic look with intricate masks and body-paint designs. Within a few years of developing their style, they bore a close resemblance to fantastical warriors from Boruca history. When I asked Pity, another younger member of the group, why he had wanted to join the group, he said, “First, obviously because they looked cool [the word he used was tuanis, Costa Rican slang to mean nice, similar to the English cool] painted, with the feathers and the colors… and also wanting to be part of that, of representing a character, and not just being in the tradition as a diablito only” (personal communication, December 2021). Over the years, the group has drawn inspiration from pre-Columbian Brunka objects, rock sculptures, painted symbols, or metal figurines found in their ancestral territory. Whether they appear inside the Juego de los Diablitos or in theatrical performances of different stories, the Non Cuanxa embody the characters with respect and close attention to artistic detail, which now make them popular in the community. Both children and elders look forward to seeing the group perform, and up to twenty people join the group each year during the annual festival. In fact, since 2010, the Non Cuanxa were given a special moment on the third day of the festival during which they walk around the playing area for a few minutes every year, displaying their costumes, while other diablitos wait on the sidelines. The Non Cuanxa have become so popular in the community over the years that, as illustrated by Joel’s interview, he started being identified in the community as “corn’s child,” a character he had represented in one performance. Most of the reservations held by the Boruca people about Non Cuanxa’s way of dressing have been replaced by admiration and a desire to know more, which translates into an interest in Boruca spirituality and historical memory.

Non Cuanxa’s decolonial practice of recuperation continues to expand throughout the community. When we received funding to make a short documentary about their work, we reached an agreement that some of the funds granted would be used to buy instruments and weaved loincloths from local artists. Galeo expressed to me that it was important to them that we support the local artisans, both because of the financial support it would provide to them and because they are the ones who keep the traditions alive. These are the artists who make the instruments that are played every year and who are recuperating the weaving of textiles. Non Cuanxa’s use of loincloths from local textiles has helped to revive what had become an increasingly less common practice among Boruca women, until the sociocultural and economic revitalization over the past three decades (Campos Chavarría). Non Cuanxa’s decolonial practice engages the community in changing the course of the Juego de los Diablitos, not only in terms of including an exploration of Boruca spirits and ancestors that were disappearing but also in terms of the socioeconomic networks in which these changes are produced. Their intentional inclusion of other ancestral artistic practices, such as textile production and music, aims to recruit others into practices of recuperation that connect to the past and renew these ancestral practices that are of considerable spiritual and economic interest to both the present and the future of Boruca.

Conclusion

I have demonstrated here that Non Cuanxa’s decolonial performance practice has helped the ongoing transformation of mask-making and performance in the Juego de los Diablitos. The group has helped to transform these traditions from being deemed pastimes for lazy people, or merely money-making enterprises, into cultural practices that deepen and innovate the Boruca’s connection to their ancestral spirituality, while simultaneously providing sources of income. Cultivating an aesthetic, political, and economic autonomy belongs to the same process of delinking from the system of coloniality, which necessitates that dependence and subjugation be maintained. Recuperation as a decolonial practice requires both a change of the politico-economic structure and an investment in the aesthetic innovation of the terms of the conversation, so that people can begin viewing themselves outside a hierarchical system that demands the negation of racialized cultures. Recuperation uses innovation to reconnect the precolonial past with the present for the revival of autonomous cultural evolutions. Within the Boruca community, the Non Cuanxa have been using performance to recuperate their own historical project, thereby gathering sufficient power to shape their future from the inside out.

Notes

Works Cited

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