Nobody knows who La Petenera was. A woman from Paterna de Rivera, some say. A Sephardic Jew, say others — the ghost of 1492, when the Crown of Spain expelled its Jewish population and Romani singers refused to perform the song for generations, afraid of being mistaken for what was no longer allowed to exist. A third theory places the origin in Mexico — in the son huasteco of the Gulf Coast, where La Petenera has been sung for generations in high falsetto, and where Columbus appears in the lyrics, matter-of-factly, as the siren's patron. The conquistador and the enchanted woman crossing the ocean together. Whether the song traveled from Spain to Mexico or from Mexico to Spain, nobody agrees. The Jews expelled in 1492 and the soldiers who followed Columbus crossed the same water in opposite directions. It is not impossible that the song crossed with them — carrying different women, different griefs, the same name.

Manuel Agujeta's voice arrives on tape — old, cracked, passionate — describing the killing of Republican soldiers. Another expulsion. The toy guitar responds with the small, tender gestures of something that does not yet know what history is.

The piece moves through three sections — violence and tenderness held in the same room, a Latin American guitar discourse building toward the unresolved, a sine-wave tuning fork with no overtones and no argument. In the final section the toy guitar returns. The performer takes it in her arms. It becomes a baby, snoring. She nurtures it.

A woman holds an object and makes it alive. This is the oldest political act there is. The state decides who exists. The mother decides what lives.

La Petenera was probably never Jewish. But the genre carries the memory of that disappearance — encodes it in superstition, in the refusal to sing it, in lyrics that keep returning to a woman nobody can name. The siren is still stranded at sea. The toy guitar snores in someone's arms. Outside, the list of the absent keeps growing.