MEXICAN SCUM
**Mexican Scum** is a 60-minute interdisciplinary performance for one actor and live piano that confronts the psychological, spiritual, and political contradictions of migration between Mexico and the United States.
The piece follows Jesús, an immigrant who undertakes a self-imposed journey on foot toward the northern border as an act of penitence. What begins as a search for redemption gradually transforms into a descent through multiple identities: migrant, laborer, citizen, immigration officer, prisoner, and ultimately a distorted spiritual figure shaped by the very systems he once resisted. Through this progression, the work exposes how violence, nationalism, and colonial imaginaries are not only imposed from the outside, but internalized and reproduced from within.
Structured as a contemporary via crucis, the performance unfolds through a sequence of physical, emotional, and symbolic trials. The performer’s body becomes the central narrative instrument—enduring exhaustion, ritual degradation, grotesque transformation, and moments of dark humor—creating a visceral landscape where the boundaries between victim and perpetrator collapse.
Live piano is not accompaniment but a parallel narrative force. The score moves between fractured reinterpretations of religious music, patriotic hymns, and fragments of popular culture, generating tension between familiarity and distortion. These musical shifts guide the rhythm of the piece, amplifying states of devotion, violence, irony, and collective memory, while exposing the ideological frameworks embedded within sound.
Visually, the work juxtaposes sacred imagery with elements of abjection and spectacle, constructing a world where faith, nationalism, and identity become unstable and contradictory. The stage becomes a site of transformation, where ritual and performance blur into one another.
Rather than offering resolution, *Mexican Scum* culminates in a direct encounter with the audience. After confronting images of fanaticism, systemic violence, and internalized hatred, the performance closes with a simple but disarming gesture: an invitation to embrace. Not as reconciliation, but as an act of resistance—fragile, human, and necessary—against the machinery of exclusion.