Teresa Serrano, La Piñata, video still, 2003, single channel video
The video La Piñata, 2003 by Teresa Serrano is oddly installed. It’s one of the smaller works on the second floor of the Kinder building at the MFAH, surprisingly washed out against the white wall, and playing so high above eyesight that it’s easy to miss — if it weren’t for the content. It is because of the content that I must confess I have never actually seen the video in its entirety from beginning to end, and can only recall the piece in bursts.
In one scene, a piñata in the shape of a woman is strung up from the ceiling. False hair hangs heavily down her back, her white crop top exposes her paper mache midriff, and her short blue shorts elongate her legs punctuated with white platform boots. A man enters the frame holding a stick that he runs along her cheekbone in a strangely delicate moment of intimacy. Then he winds up and takes the first swing.
I can’t remember where that first swing lands exactly on the female-shaped piñata. This is usually the point where I have to look away. This video is not just a piece commenting on a social issue. It is a dark, sardonic re-enactment of life in Mexico.
In the United States, it is called “domestic abuse.” In Mexico, it is called feminicidio or femicide, and while the two terms might imply the same situation of violence, they are treated very differently, particularly in a cultural state in which “domestic” matters always remain indoors. In Mexico, violence against women has been met with radical revisionism that was forced upon the powers that be by a social and cultural situation of machismo that caused an escalation of violence against women to a point that it could no longer be ignored.
When I talk about the violence against women in other parts of the world people are often surprised that there is a specific word with a specific definition of said violence. I often reply that the state could no longer avoid addressing it, giving it a name, and removing it from a sphere of hidden domesticity because this violence was no longer three or four people removed. It was — and remains to be — direct, now only one person removed and affecting the lives of every single woman across the country.
In the summer of 2019, my best friend Aliana Villarreal was found dead in her home, gruesomely stabbed to death by her live-in, male partner. Her apartment was sealed off as a crime scene for one month, after which her family and I proceeded to distribute the contents of her life. I still wear the gold bracelet that says, “I miss you” which I found mixed in with her jewelry. Many of her plants are thriving in my home garden. A small print by Cruz Ortiz that was part of her collection lives in my dining room, and her coffee table lives in my bedroom. I keep a flower in a gold vase that was once hers by my bed. Her photo holds a prominent place on my Day of the Dead altar. I light a candle on her birthday and the anniversary of her D-Day destroys me every year.
In 2020, the entire world experienced a pandemic that had most of us in Mexico enclosed in our homes. The stats for violence against women were slowly creeping up, and throughout the year of the pandemic as women were isolated in their homes these statistics became gruesome. At one point it was reported that a woman was a victim of a femicide every 13 minutes.
The city was a pressure cooker in ways people didn’t expect. On March 8th, 2021, one year later, the pressure finally spilled over, and the annual women’s march exploded into the streets, an appropriate place to protest the violence that women were experiencing behind the closed doors of their domestic space for far too long, and the rage was palpable. Monuments were defaced, Molotov cocktails were thrown, and images of women screaming in the faces of riot police surfaced.
In the press, the protest was laughingly and ironically called “violent,” labels I never fully understood. After all, it was only a few statues of a bunch of historically famous dudes that were spray-painted purple — a mild retaliation from generations of violence and abusive social structures that don’t have anything to do with our bodies but everything to do with our existence.
I have tried to watch Serrano’s piece through to the end more times than I can count. Perhaps, I don’t need to watch it to know how it ends because I am one of many who has already lived it.
For those that don’t, here’s how it goes: At some point in Serrano’s video, the man approaches the swinging piñata shaped like a woman and kisses her thigh. It’s grotesquely unsettling. He takes a few more swings until the bottom of her legs separate from the rest of her body, leaving her head and half her torso swinging in the air.
