2 Liberation through Afro-Latinx Art in Seattle. Featuring Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra
Chapter 2
Liberation through Afro-Latinx Art in Seattle. Featuring Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra
Introduction
It’s time for the Ofrenda Postcast! A series of special episodes dedicated to learning more about the roots and futures of ofrenda practice at the heart of Dia de Muertos practices and that continue throughout the year. Celebrations are planned for Seattle Center, Beacon Hill, Burien, White Center, Tacoma and places all throughout the United States and Mexico. In our episode, “Liberation through Afro-Latinx Art in Seattle”, we explore the theme of dance as a reparative and transformative project. My name is Lauren Keltgen, Lissy Marin-Contreras and I are your hosts for the next half hour. We are a team of Univeristy of Washington Students enrolled in a Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies course called “Latina Cultural Production” and we produced this episode in partnership with KVRU 105.7 Commmunity Radio and the Women Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Collective. We will be talking with Milvia Pacheco.
Guest Bio
Milvia Berenic Pacheco Salvarierra is a Afro-Latina artist from Caracas-Venezula. She is a contemporary dancer located in the Seattle area who started a movement geared towards the Afro-Latinx community. She is a community organizer for MÁS (Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle), a non-profit dedicated to the preservation of Afrolatino cultural heritage. She has dedicated her life to using movement to reach liberation.
Production Team
Ali McMahan, Directory/Quality Producer
Leslie Ramos, Sound Producer/Audio Management
Lissy Marin-Contreras, On Air Host
Lauren Keltgen, On Air Host
Brianna Algarin, Story Theme Producer
Description & Theme
In the episode, “Liberation through Afro-Latinx Art in Seattle,” our hosts Lissy Marin-Contreras and Lauren Keltgen explore dance as a reparative and transformative project with Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra. Milvia is dancer from Venezuela who is located in the Seattle area and leads a movement that seeks to empower the Afro-Latinx community. We ask our Miliva about how she leads “MAS: Moviemento Afro Latino Seattle” and her vision for the organization within the Afro-Latinx community. Milvia describes honoring Blackness in a context of anti-blackness across the Americas as a way to build a community and resistance; we ask her about advice she’d give to other people from the Afro-Latinx community about centering with Blackness as a way to heal and repair. Milvia tells us how she learned how to dance and how she uses movement as a way of healing and resistance. We wondered how she believes her art and dance are used to encourage others to get involved with the cause of her movement through movement.
In the time of being in a worldwide pandemic, we ask about how COVID-19 has affected Pacheco’s dancing and if she found a solution for her to keep dancing even though a pandemic. Another question of how COVID-19 has impacted the Afro-Latinx community and how Miliva has tried to help her community through the pandemic waves. Milvia explains how she witnessed the impacts of COVID-19 firsthand on the Afro-Latinx community. Our team Ali McMahan, Leslie Ramos, Lauren Keltgen, Brianna Algarin, we’re excited to hear about our interviewees responses to her life and about her organization!
Theme: How we can use dance to transform the lives of Afro-Latinx/Latinx communities? Milvia explains to our team how dance is used to transform these lives of people. Our theme captures the idea of restorative resilience by using the art of dance as a way to make a reparative project. At the beginning of the quarter we discussed deeply about Latinx artists who use their forms of art to have a resilience.
Interview
Lissy Marin-Contreras: Hello, Milvia Pacheco, nice to meet you. We would first like to start with having you tell us a little bit about what you’re doing.
Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra: Hello, Lissy and Lauren. Thank you for having me here in this space, I love to use all my name, my name is Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra. And the reason I like to use my name is to honor also my mother’s side and use her name too. In Latinoamerica we used to have two names, and two last names. And I would love to honor that. Now in this journey of strengthening my voice and my identity. What I do:, well, I’m an Afro Latino artist, I do poetry, movement, dance, and also I am a mother of an incredible nine years old kid. His name is Akim Gael Salvatierra and I am also a community organizer, and the executive director of MÁS Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle. That is a nonprofit organization based here in Seattle, that, with the mission of creating visibility of the historical and cultural contribution of the African descendant in Latinoamerica. And we do all this because we believe, center blackness and raising the voices of the afro descendants, it is a way to create social equity. Racial Equality. And um things that we do? We do community conversations, we do concerts, we do workshops, we breach artists from different regions of Latin America that are local here in Seattle that are doing work, creating visibility of those contributions, cultural contributions here in Seattle, and create bridges for them to know each other and strengthen their collaborations. Yeah, this is what I do, I do all this because I believe that art is a tool for empowerment and for healing. And I think that I like and need to be in process of creation all the time. This is who I am! Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra!
Lauren Keltgen: That’s amazing. You talk about centering blackness as a way for community building and resistance. What advice would you give to other people from the afro Latinx community about centering with blackness as a way to heal and repair?
Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra: Well, that is the message I think actually we been so, been imposed a culture, through the process of colonialism, we’ve been learning that we need to become white. And in that process we have been in the need to find resources in the need to validate as a human being with being internalized this idea that a European central voice and cosmology, it is the one that acts as a validate who we are. And in that process, we’ve practically become white descendants in some way. And I think like is important for us to recognize that to be able to search and connect with our ancestrality, with our blackness, and with our indigenism, to be able to just resist, to florecer. This is what I think to florecer, I don’t know how to say that in English but, to born as a entire being, to be who we are, to recognize all those voices that been silenced inside of our own process, and it been looking for that knowledge, looking and connecting with this ancestral knowledge is the way to reclaim and to gain a space in our associated to create equity to this to say, you know, we are here we still here, even though these social structures are trying to erase us. My message is connecting with your family, connecting with your ancestrality, trying to understand where do you come from? What are those connections that have been lost in the walking of trying to get accesses and to try to get validation? And trying to define what are the things that are being imposed and you take in and what are the things that are actually part of who you want and cultivate that part of who you are in relationship with your Afro-descendants, and your indigenous descendants. I think collecting work, it is important, but collecting work in the direction of bringing awareness of all this knowledge that have been taken away. To recognize that and to bring their voices to the collective work, it is things that it’s important that we need to work together to, to create those spaces, those connections with the land, those connections with culture and art that our ancestors have been continuing doing and continuing bringing alive, and you know, massify those experiences.
Lissy Marin-Contreras: Wow, I love that message. I feel like that has so much power. And I love that you’re telling us what advice you would give to others. Now, we would like to learn a little bit more about the way you got into dancing. When did you learn how to dance and have there been any changes of the genre you perform when you dance?
Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra: When I learned to dance? I think I’m still learning to dance. I think dance is something that is so fluid and movement is so fluid. I think I learned to dance in the womb of my mother. But I think I was 13 years old when I started to do theater because I wanted to become an actress. I grew up in Caracas-Venezuela, in a neighborhood called San Augustine that is like an inner-city in Caracas with the majority of the population of that neighborhood is Afro-descendant people. It is from regions of Barlovento in Venezuela there was a lot of migration from the region of Barlovento to Caracas. And then in San Augustin in this neighborhood, it is like the 75% of the population of that neighborhood are black descendants. And I grew up there and it was a place a community center there that they teached dance, music, and theater, and I want to be an actress and get into the class of the workshop of theater workshop. And I, doing theater I realized that I was just through movement. And I start to investigate what are the things related to movement that I can do and I start to take to a fun school and start to train as a contemporary dancer and experience movement and experienced dance give me so much sensation of freedom, sensation of like, oh, I can access a part of myself that I couldn’t access before experience. Movement in this way that that creates a see in myself that this is what I want to do in my life. I want to move. I want to move because I want to, to feel this power. This gives me a sense of power. And that seems power was like how I can develop, that’s how I can use, and they say those power come because I was able to feel my whole and feel that I can I don’t need to hide anything but through moments I can express through connecting with myself. And with this space of spirituality, this space of energy, this space of that makes me feel that I’m part of something that is bigger than my own body. And that sensation drives me or helps me to continue to pursue a career as a dancer and I started to train in different schools and then become a contemporary dancer and I was started to work in one of the companies in Venezuela called DanzaHoy! And then I was performing and working with this company for more than 12 years doing tours around the world, representing Venezuela, as contemporary dance with this contemporary dance company. And it was incredible, but at the same time that I felt like I was healing and I was finding myself and freedom. There was something there that I still be like, oh, I need to find my voice. As an artist, I need to find my own voice. I’ve been dancing and been using my body to talk other stories, stories of the people that was creating choreography and I want to start to do my own work. But I was so afraid to present myself in that way. I decided to move out of Venezuela, because at that time was like, Oh, well after dancing with DanzaHoy!, what is the next step for me as an artist? And I moved to Buenos Aires because I also wanted to continue doing training as an actress. And then in Buenos Aires, I moved from Buenos Aires to New York. In New York, I was working with a colleague that invited me to work in her company and live seven years in New York, searching for that, searching for my voice. And in that searching for my voice I started to understand that what I actually was missing in all this work and, yeah in all this work that I was doing as an artist, is understanding my positionality in the work as a black woman. And I think that was until I come here to Seattle that the contrast with the community here was so strong. Here in Seattle there is a lot of white culture so strong that compared with New York, and in the East Coast, that I found myself like feeling like Oh, actually I need to talk about this in my art. I need to talk about this in my art, i need to talk about who I am as a black woman immigrant in this world. And then I start to change a little bit the way that I was expressing myself as a contemporary dancer, and I started to work to investigate and get closer with traditional dance from Afro-Latino dance from South America. I met this incredible woman Monica Rojas that he is the founder of MÁS and also the founder of DE CAJóN Project and I started to learn about Afro Peruvian music and dance, and then I met Mestre Silvinho , and started to work a little bit more about Capoeira, and then Panama folklore, Blanca Prater, and started to learn a little bit about Afro Panamanian music and dance. In 2014, when I met Monica, with this project at Langston Hughes called De Inga y Mandinga . That is a project that she was directing. And she invited me to do choreography, and work as an artist with her, and I started to get relationships with all these different artists that do Afro diasporic art. And through that my work started to change through those connections to try to see like, Oh, I’m also part of this collective community, I’m part of this community, that bring awareness of what is our ancestrality. And through that understanding, I start to explore more like, oh, I want to get connected back with my Afro-Venezuelan culture, and connecting with anthropology. Meyby Ugueto, and I start to ask a question and to get involved and get the knowledge for what is this music? What is this art? What is this connection with my African ancestrality, or Afro-Venezuelan ancestrality, that I can bring forward in the work that I do as a mover. All the work that I do now, I think it’s informed, as an artist, it’s informed through these connections, is making out there it is the drum and the rhythm of the drum as place, that is center, to understand my positionality as a black woman, also what are the things that have been a struggle to hide that understanding that I am freedom now I want to freed myself through all these conceptions that I have about how bodies should be moving and how bodies should be presenting themselves? And now it is like, No, that is an imposition on the way of see, and in the way of move, that I need to erase or restore, to be able to connect actually with moments that talk about my others, identities and these other heritage that I carry on through my existence. I don’t know if that answers your question.
Lauren Keltgen: No, that’s amazing. I love how you say you started dancing in your mother’s womb. Truly a lifelong pursuit. You’ve spoken about how art and movement is tied to identity, community, and culture. How do you encourage others to use movement as a way of resistance and healing?
Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra: Well, I think life is movement you know, we are continuing, we’re continuing moving through this process of life. I feel like it is important; I encourage people to listen to their own way of move. I encourage people to, even people that think that they are not artists, that pay attention of what is the way they move because I think there is a lot of knowledge on observe and pay attention on the way that you move. The way that you move is the way that you carry yourself, is the way that you connect with others is the way that you give signs and give information to others. And I think like embrace movement, as an art also, it is an incredible tool to be healthy, emotionally to connect with joy, to connect with a spirit. And I invite everybody to connect with movement and dance in their own capacity.
Lissy Marin-Contreras: That is amazing. I personally also love to dance. So I understand how dancing can have such an empowering message behind it. So we would like to know how the practice of dance was impacted by COVID-19 and how like affected you or people you know in the world of dancing and did you find the solution to keep dancing, although there was COVID?
Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra: Well COVID, I think COVID has bring so many different experiences for me, and in relationship with dance, I stopped to dance in the ways that I was dancing before COVID-19 because confinement. And the first team was like, okay, I cannot go and meet with others, I like to move and dance with others. I like go to West African class, I want to go to contemporary class and you know, being a classroom with others, it is something that is important for me, and I’m a person that they gain energy, when I’m in movement with others. And COVID brings these restrictions, bring these confinements. I live in a small apartment, two-bedroom apartment, here in Beacon Hill, and was like, well, I have to find a new way to move a new way to experience movement. And I started to write, I’ve been writing for a long time, but COVID-19 has been increasing that possibility. And also painting, drawing, and I in 2000, before COVID, I get a knee surgery, and that experience of confined, give me the possibility to thinking about dance in something different that is not just my body on this space, but how I can dance and use the technique that I learned through dance that have to allow the impulse, I like to improvise a lot through dance. And I use this technique where you use the impulse as a way to follow lines and movements and well, I can use this same sensation and not be using my left side of the brain to define what are what is the things that I’m gonna do, but I can use my right side of the brain I use my intuition, to informs the work that I want to use movement as an action to explore other media. And this is what I’ve been doing and this is what COVID have been bringing to me. I’ve been using that technique I’ve been writing, I’ve been drawing, I’ve been connecting with the body and create these new general ways of present myself as a performer, that I call poemas en movimiento. It’s poems in movement, poems that move and is these ways where I can the words and the poem is is revived through movement. Is like a spoken word, but I use my body and the vibration of my body to create resonance outside in the way that I sharing the words that I want to perform, use sound and rhythms and movements to also inform that poetry or that message that I want to share. The other things that bring COVID is Altar process, when COVID start and the confine start, there was a need to to take away fear from my body and the frustration to be confined and the process that create when you are being forced to be in one place, not knowing, the uncertainty of what is going to happen on the world, the uncertainty you know when COVID start also was in a really striding place. The world is gonna end, the old things that we was trying to fight was feeling like it was incrementing. You know was this like the racial, the sensation of like all these things that we was fighting was maximized. I can see more how this force of racial conflict was put in more strong, we were like what is this? And instead to letting myself go through the fear of this, Uh yes, I went to protest, yes, I want to do, but I also want to connect with spirit and with ancestors in more strong way because I recognize that that is where can bring center and knowledge, and then I started to do this process of meditations through altar. And I was building altars every day as a daily altars that can, first give me space to connect with my spirit and ancestors, also ways to do art as a something that is accessible, something that I don’t have to have a space, or have to do, have money, or have to do everything that was in my house was elements that I can use to build those altars, and a moment to be with me in pray. But no in the pray that I learned that I felt like is a pray impulse for Catholicism. But I pray that I can access and connecting also with my African and Indigenous side. And I decided to do altars every day to start my day, as a way to start my day. And it was like connecting all those different scenarios, those different parts of my life that will who I am. And the altar there was that place where all those different states as an artist, as Afro-Venezuelan, as a mother, as an immigrant, it is emerge in this process of making altar. Okay can be an artist, and a mother, and a black woman, and a daughter, and immigrant building this little micro-altar using my intuition and my connection as a way to pray for us to continue in creating connection and centering ourselves to be able to fight and resist all the things that are common to us. And I think that this is the way that I’m continuing dancing, I’m continuing dancing doing altar, and continuing dancing organizing, and I’m continuing dancing during COVID-19 through these poems f movements that I created because confine.
Lauren Keltgen: It is amazing to hear how you have continued an abundant artful life in the face of COVID and you further connected with your identity and community. Lastly, is there anything else you would like to promote about yourself or any upcoming projects?
Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra: Well, we continue organizing with MÁS Movimiento Afrolatino Seattle, and right now we’re doing a series of conversations that we call conversaciones para orgullo. These conversations, the next two conversations of this series, we have a series of conversations and this series is called Territorios de Libertad: Testimonios de la Diáspora Afro, Territories of Freedom: Testimonies of the Afro-diasporic, and we have our first conversation last Saturday, October 16, and our next conversation is going to be on November 13. Is a Saturday three to five pm, and our third conversation of that series is going to be on December 11. It is also a Saturday at three to five. You can found us in our Facebook page Movimiento Afro-Latinos Seattle and in our webpage. Also you can find information about this series of conversation, and also we’re going to have Versadas artists doing versadas and micro-workshops and this is an event that we are organizing right now for November 20. And it is in collaboration or is being supported for Department of Health to promote vaccination and information of COVID-19. And we are doing this event in collaboration with the Department of Health. And that is going to happen on November 20 is also a Saturday, three to five. Follow us in our Facebook page. And we are you know, making a call, all the Afro Latinos artists and Afro Latinos communities that are there that want to get engaged and want to get connections. It’s important to work together and we are stronger united. This is like our, the phrase and we believe that we are stronger united, we believe in collaboration. And we are making a call to all these Afro Latinos outside that want to make connections with us. Go to our face page, our webpage, add to our mailing list and send us a message and we will connect back.
Lissy Marin-Contreras: Wow, what an amazing and empowering message you have given us today. Yeah, we recommend anyone listening that is part of the Afro Latino community looking for a community to search you guys up and really join different events that you listed. Thank you so much for meeting with us and being a part of this.
Milvia Berenice Pacheco Salvatierra: Yeah thank you, Lauren, thank you, Lissy, and I hope I can see you around, hope I can connect with you also.
Lauren Keltgen: Yes please! We’d love to see you!
Review New Insights on Theme:
Lauren Keltgen: Wow, that was such an amazing interview, Milvia gave really powerful personal insights on resistance and community. I thought it was wonderful how she centered visibility and creating communities of care and action. This is a direct challenge to colonialism and the attempted erasure of communities living in diaspora. She spoke about using her art as a way to center blackness and indigeneity in response to a whitewashed culture. Millvina encouraged individuals to connect with their ancestral ways and their personal histories using art and community as a tool for repair and resistance. Milvia spoke about her dance practice as a way to connect with her Afro-Venezuelan culture. She uses dance to explore free and resilient movement. Milvia uses her own movement as a way to connect with identity and culture, finding powerful connection through dance.
Lissy Marin-Contreras: Yeah, something that I personally connected with was the fact that Sylvia said she had been dancing since she was really small. I grew up in an environment where I also dance to my cultures music and I really do agree with Sylvia that this art form really does help you connect with your culture and your roots. I also believe that this dance helps you connect with a part of your culture that strengthens who you are as a person and helps build a new community. I met other dancers when I started dancing, and we all got to share this beautiful art form. I would recommend if anyone has interest in learning, any dance from any culture to not be afraid and really explored the different art forms that there is in each culture. We all know that our cultures are beautiful, and that’s why a lot of us want to share it and not keep it to ourselves. So I think when I say this, I speak for all of us that it is okay to explore and learn new dances from each culture in a respectful manner to bring alive some of the cultures that have been hidden and marginalize, it displays resistance and helps the community grow.
Lauren Keltgen: Another amazing point that Milvia stated was held because life is moving so fast, we sometimes forget to live in the moment. I love how she encourages us to move our bodies and really express ourselves in this specific art form. Moving around and expressing yourself can be helpful as a way to process what life is giving to you. I have learned that dancing really has a lot of power, and that it can really help you express your feelings and emotions and the stresses that life gives you. This new knowledge really is setting in and making me realize that I want to be dancing more and really getting in touch with this form of expression that is often overlooked.
Lissy Marin-Contreras: I also want to applaud Milvia for finding a way to express yourself in a beautiful art firm during the pandemic. She told us of something amazing that I’ve never really heard from anyone which is that when drawing she uses the movement in her hand as a way of dancing, which is such an empowering and amazing way to express oneself that I will hopefully try and nature.
Lauren Keltgen: I totally agree. And I would encourage anyone who was in Seattle and is part of the Afro-Latinx community to search up their facebook and join this movement. Even if you are not I still encourage you to look it up and support such an amazing movement that is building stronger communities of those who need it.
Outro
Thank you for listening. The Ofrenda Postcast is a collaboration between KVRU 105.7 FM Radio, students of the UW Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies class “Latina Cultural Production,” taught by Michelle Habell-Pallan, Highline Heritage Museum’s ‘Our Voices: Social Justice in times of COVID-19’, and the Womxn Who Rock: Making Scenes, Building Communities Collective. We’d like to thank our guests Milvia Pacheco and our podcast team Lauren Keltgen, Lissy Marin-Contreras, Ali McMahan, Leslie Ramos, and Brianna Algarin. Friends and family may hear this by visiting the KVRU 105.7 FM website. Special thanks to the band Quetzal for our theme music titled “Barrio Healer.” Look out for Dia de Muertos events in the the fall in south Seattle, and online, and check out Highline Heritage Museum’s ‘Our Voices: Social Justice in times of COVID-19’ series. For questions, email ofrendapodcast@gmail.com. Thank you so much for listening.
Interview Date: October 2021
