Now Entering Agave Land, Population: Todos

“Art and architecture—all the arts—do not have to exist in isolation, as they do now. This fault is very much a key to the present society. Architecture is nearly gone, but it, art, all of the arts, in fact all parts of the society, have to be rejoined, and joined more than they have ever been.”

—Donald Judd, “Statement for The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati,” (1987)

Perhaps an article covering an event called Agave Festival Marfa (June 6-9) will appear peculiar in a journal like this one, dedicated, as its masthead indicates, to Texas visual art. But as anyone who has spent time in Marfa knows, to care about art is to care about the place that sustains it, i.e., the ecological conditions that make art and life possible. What I discovered, while attending Agave Festival Marfa, is that the agave plant, and the festival that celebrates its significance, is but one point of entry into a vast network of cross-border, cross-disciplinary, and inter-species relationships that include humans (yes, artists too), other animals, and plants. These unique categories of life manifested during the festival as interdependently connected in reciprocating ways that continue to determine many facets of daily life across the Western hemisphere. Even the structure of the festival, which traversed the town of Marfa, was intriguingly rhizomatic, expanding in different directions simultaneously by bringing together poets, biologists, artists, archeologists, anthropologists, activists, journalists, filmmakers, distillers, and musicians in a four-day series of events that provided a stimulating feast for the curious and concerned.

Agave is perhaps best known today as the source of tequila and mescal but “Agave is Life,” a film directed by Meredith Dreiss and David O. Brown, kicked off the festival by highlighting the social dimension of the plant for Indigenous communities. The film documented the plant’s historic and ongoing ritual functions, for example, its role in coming-of-age ceremonies for Mescalero Apache girls and its incorporation into the Aztec pantheon as Mayahuel, the part plant/part woman fertility goddess. In a free nature hike provided by the festival at the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, Agave Restoration Coordinator for Bat Conservation International, Rachel Burke, explained that the agave also has a symbiotic relationship with migratory Mexican long-nosed bats. These animals circulate between central Mexico and the southwestern states of the U.S., freely ignoring, like the agave itself, the political borders that segregate the land as they move from agave to agave, scooping up nectar from the plant’s pollinating flowers and ensuring the distribution of its biodiversity throughout the Chihuahuan desert. Moments like these of un-mapping and re-orientation to the physical and cultural landscape were constant throughout the festival. 

Although agave has been used by humans to produce food, fiber, and fermented drinks for at least 10,000 years, biologist Patricia Colunga emphasized the dangers of industrial mono-crop plantations meant to produce maximum yields of tequila, mescal, or henequén (a popular fiber export in the early twentieth century). Industrial manufacturing of the agave has not only reduced the plant’s biodiversity, its ability to propagate from seed, and its resilience to fighting off disease but has led, in at least one early twentieth-century example, to the illegal enslavement in Yucatán of Maya, Yaqui, and Asian peoples to maximize profits for plantation owners. 

Although serious issues like these were discussed soberly there were many opportunities to imbibe sustainably produced agave-derived spirits. Alternative practices that emphasize biodiversity and draw from Indigenous knowledge were presented in both English and Spanish during a panel discussion led by a group of Mexican distillers who cultivate agave using these methods. After the talk, the audience could then sample these same growers’ spirits while eating delicious free tamales brought over from the nearby border town of Ojinaga, Chihuahua. One of the most remarkable facets of the festival was the manner in which embodied knowledge was regularly communicated through multiple sensory channels; the ability, for example, to savor the flavors of sustainable agave-distilled spirits, taste free food from the region, or visit the botanical gardens to experience agaves in their natural habitat beautifully broke down the cartesian dualism of mind and body. 

On the evening of the second night of the festival, live music became another conduit for feeling the rhythms of the ecosystem. Three local musical groups — one country, one cumbia, and one norteño — performed at El Cosmico, creating a sonic snapshot of sounds commonly heard within the agave’s natural habitat. Many attendees could be seen dancing and swaying to the rhythms of this soundscape. Gaby Híjar, a visual artist from Creel, Chihuahua, presented at the Judd Foundation the following morning sonic ceramic sculptures inspired by the negative space produced from the contours of her own body. Híjar then invited the audience to play them with her, which collaboratively created a batimiento that blended body, sculpture, land, and sound. Sandra Harper, a Marfa-based artist working in a more figurative modality, debuted sculptures made from yucca fibers, some of which anthropomorphized the plant matter into human and other animal shapes, perhaps as a means of conveying the symbiosis between plant and animal. 

The importance of crossing borders of all kinds, including disciplinary ones, was a common theme throughout the festival. Archeologist Charles Koenig discussed the mathematical and scientific biases of his discipline in studying the value of agave for ancient cultures and argued that archeologists need to incorporate the social and cultural dimensions of the plant into their studies to understand why this food was held in such high esteem by ancient peoples. A panel of journalists based in Mexico and the U.S. discussed the threat of “pink slime” journalism, or (frequently A.I.-generated) filler, and the propagation, ad nauseam, of the three “C’s” (crisis, conflict, and chaos) to describe the borderlands, which they said has diminished the public’s trust in journalism. Their proposed solution was to create what panelist Angela Kocherga described as bi-cultural, bi-national, and bilingual journalism. They imagined a future of journalism that involved collaborations between younger and older journalists, local and foreign correspondents, investigative reporters and poets, in the hopes that the stories they produce would reach an audience hungry for news that exists outside the narrow band of the three “C’s.” 

Other presenters, like author Álvaro Enrigue, disrupted the borders between fact and fiction when he read from his delightfully imaginative book You Dreamed of Empires. His novel recounts one of the most fateful days in the history of the Western hemisphere: the day Hernán Cortés met the Aztec emperor Montezuma II. Simultaneously historical and fictional, serious and playful, Enrigue’s novel was able to penetrate the austere façade of factual evidence by making these historical figures and their follies incredibly relatable as they echoed the behavior of the rich and powerful today. In his talk, Enrigue weaved together moments of whimsy with concern, remarking that unfortunately we continue to live in Cortés’s nightmare and the sleeping conquistador shows no sign of waking anytime soon.

About half of the festival participants either hailed from or spent considerable time in Latin America, or were members of Indigenous communities, and many of them addressed the audience in their native language. At the same time, the significance of language and translation was a recurring theme discussed by different participants throughout the festival and brought a welcome dose of critical consciousness to the power of representation and how it shapes our ideological relationships to place, people, and plants. Oscar Rodriguez and Dr. Nakaya Flotte, members of the Lipan Apache Tribe of Texas, discussed why a specific rock formation found in the Big Bend and labeled in the 1960s by the U.S. government as Elephant Rock should be renamed Cibolo Rock. They claimed that Cibolo, which is a Spanish word meaning Buffalo, more inclusively traverses the history of Indigenous, Spanish, Mexican, and American cultures within the region. Other presenters, like the Diné poet Sherwin Bitsui, shared poems that combined Navajo and English but in ways that made their relationship to one another feel both formally proximal and culturally distanced; incredibly personal at times, Bitsui’s poems modeled, in one sense, a way of addressing collective belonging but with individuation. 

Among the highlights of the festival was a reading by and discussion with the poet Margaret Randall, who spent many years of her life living in exile throughout Latin America. A life-long participant in social justice struggles, Randall discussed the importance of collaboration, finding common ground across borders and species, and the redeeming qualities of slow, deliberate, and thoughtful action. In the 1960s, Randall co-founded, alongside Sergio Mondragón, the journal El Corno Emplumado (The Plumed Horn), which became a vehicle for creating international solidarity among poets and writers throughout the Western hemisphere. Published bilingually in Mexico City, El Corno showcased writing by Elaine de Kooning, Cecilia Vicuña, and Leonora Carrington to name only a few of its many contributors. During a conversation with the poet Roberto Tejada, Randall told stories of her life in exile, first in Mexico, then Cuba, then Nicaragua throughout the 70s and 80s, as she wrote and published books and photographically documented life during revolutionary times. At Randall’s inspirational talk, I could not help but think of the agave, which similarly thrives when it grows in solidarity with other species; although each may be acting out of self-interest, there can be, in the best instances, reciprocity, interdependence, and even mutual respect that ensures the survival of the cohort. With growing authoritarianism around the world, Randall warned, the stakes have never been higher to resist greed and violence by acting with integrity and strengthening the social bonds of community. 

 The festival concluded with an improvisational performance by Carmina Escobar, Aaron González, Stefan González, and Rob Mazurek, whose instrumentation ranged from drums, stand-up bass, vibraphone, conch shell, trumpet, and glass bottle to practically anything that could make some kind of sound. There was an ecstatic intensity to the way they played, enhanced by Escobar’s incredible vocal range, that seemed to dissolve the borders between art and life. At a particularly quiet and pregnant moment in the quartet’s set, an audience member could be heard unexpectedly dropping something loudly on the floor; as if in response, Mazurek dropped the shaker in his hand, which signaled to me that everyone and everything was an active contributor to the sound environment being created. At another moment, Escobar unfurled streams of red paper from their mouth, then broke the fourth wall of the stage by passing this paper rope up through the seated audience in the theater, activating the entire space. Despite the manifold modes of address throughout the festival, this final gesture indicated something I had been sensing all weekend, which is that there is life and relationality in and between nearly everything, but it is how one acts on that knowledge that makes all the difference.