BARRENDERA

MORILLEROS

YERBERO

ORACULO

Maura Leticia M. Aranda

As a child she worked as a domestic worker and local gardener. “I used to fix trees,” she tells us, “loosen the soil, cut the grass, before I was hired as a permanent street sweeper.” At five in the morning she sets out for the storage shed, where she takes her wheelbarrow, her broom, and her “marinas,” two enormous lobster-shell-like sheets with which she gathers the dust that doesn’t cling to the broom. She has swept the same stretch of street for 28 years.

We decide to replace the broom handle with a black clay flute (because the act of sweeping is like a mantra of caresses: it sets us to meditating, whistling, or whispering a song). We decorate the flutes with stalks from the hills of San Lorenzo, and so they look like paintbrushes, with which the street sweeper seems to caress the street instead of sweeping it.

From time to time she plays the flute, but the neighbors don’t notice anything. They only say, “Good morning, Maura!” followed by a couple of bleary-eyed, resigned dogs.

Juan Vazquez

Antonio M. Gonzales

The morillos were the pencils of the hill. The morillero horses used them to trace the footpaths along the slopes, like veins of graphite binding the forests tightly to the city. The peasants were experts at everything: they knew how to sow, how to find the lost young of the sheep, how to build roofs with morillos, how to recognize woods and stones; they knew how to follow the tracks of animals that walk in reverse (now extinct), how to use herbs (to cure ailments or to become more fertile), how to read the stars, predict the weather, and survive lightning.

They also knew how to speak with dogs and teach children to untie knots while looking straight at the Sun. Sometimes they were even musicians, and they were the only Philosophers of the Enveloping Sky.

Juan Perez Rodriguez

y Guadalupe, his daughter

Doña Victoria, his grandmother—a healer with bony hands—snatched a quince-wood switch from little Juan’s hands and, with it, gave him his first lesson across the backside, for having nearly destroyed an aloe plant with a wooden-sword blows. And so Juanito learned to respect plants as if they were people.

Herding sheep in the forest was a punishment in San Lorenzo, and Juanito was sent off as a shepherd for having failed in elementary school. Ironically, this became his second great school, since in his retreat as a shepherd-hermit, other ascetic sheep herders taught him everything about medicinal herbs. There he came to know the hill, its hidden corners, and its plants.

Now, at seventy, he walks with his daughter Guadalupe toward the cave of San Pablocan, and inside they play the drum-stones. With its offerings and its little chapels, San Pablocan is a proto-pyramid, or a church inside a gourd—a hollow where underground rivers and the roots of trees breathe at the same time.

Rosa Maria P. Arguelles

Her mother taught her to make tortillas the hard way, slapping her hands with an electrical cord if the griddle was left empty, since she would not tolerate “wasting my firewood, you idiot.”

“My life experiences have led me to transform pain and adversity…” says Rosa María, rubbing the metallic tendons of her hands, or the marks her mother left on her heart, “…I have learned and I have forgiven. My shames have been cleansed.”

The oracle is a cart–tortilla stand that carries a griddle engraved with the Oracle of the Tortillas. The oracle’s powers are: “Destiny Power,” “Guiding Power,” “Opposing Power,” and “Allied Power.” Through these powers, the tortillas speak differently, depending on whether they puff up or fail to puff up on the griddle.

After her reading, the customers

take their steaming tortillas with them and eat them with sea salt, or just as they are, without fossils, like tulip buds turned into buttons.

Like Mextoys, La Pasión Según la Gente, The Mexican National Anthem as I Recall It from My Childhood, and Se fueron los pájaros—all works with a strong autobiographical impulse—Fatalismo Mágico also serves as an homage to the complexity and contradictory richness of the Mexican landscape: sonic and visual, cultural, historical, and contemporary.

These pieces engage deeply with themes of displacement, violence, and cultural automation. Drawing on the legacy of the Latin American movement known as Realismo Mágico, Fatalismo Mágico moves beyond any romanticized and automated idealization. Instead, it confronts the layered tensions embedded within the Mexican landscape—its structural violence, its historical weight, and its unresolved contradictions. At the same time, the work remains infused with resistance: gestures of defiance against hegemony, quiet forms of hope, radical openness, and enduring desire. In this sense, Fatalismo Mágico does not simply portray a landscape—it inhabits it like a character, revealing both its wounds and its capacity for transformation.

C. Sandoval: Character sketches

The four characters are indeed not fictional: they are actually real people living in Milpa Alta, the four of them performing themselves in a kind of intervened non-fictional way.

Fatalismo Mágico unfolded over four days in the landscape of Milpa Alta—one day dedicated to each character. It took place in a region shaped by volcanoes and lava fields, where the city presses against Nopal agriculture, caves, and forest. This territory is not merely a backdrop but an active force within the work: a living terrain marked by geological violence and human persistence. In Milpa Alta, volcanic stone coexists with cultivated milpas, ancestral caves with expanding urban edges. The landscape embodies tension—between rural and urban, ancient and contemporary, survival and transformation—and becomes inseparable from the emotional and symbolic journeys of the four protagonists.