ENTRE - VISTA /// INNER - VIEW CON RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET

August 14, 2025

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I first encountered Raul’s work through an issue of Cinematograph volume 4 published by SF CINEMATAQUE and written/edited by Jeffrey Skoller. The text was The Videotapes of the Latino Midwest Video Collective: A Manifesto by Raúl Ferrera-Balanquet.

The Latino Midwest Video Collective began in Iowa, as a collection of work and practices in both film and video within US Latino, Caribbean and Latin American. The aesthetic inspirations focus on the terrain of popular memory, migration, exile, the politics of desire and experimental production. Latino Midwest Video Collective (LMVC) was originally founded by Adriana Zuanic (Chile), Joe Castel (Xicano), Carlos Rojas-Cardona (MX/USA), Olivero Rivera Davila (Puerto Rico), Jacqueline Rangel (Venezuela) and critically acclaimed Cuban American interdisciplinary media artist Raul Ferrera-Balanquet (Raul Moarquech) when they were studying film and communication at the University of Iowa in the early 1980s.

Film historian Ana M. Lopez, then completing her Ph.D at the University of Iowa, was a major influence in the foundation of the collective. Lopez was Zuanic and Ferrera-Balanquet's academic adviser at the film school and, when they took her Latin American Cinema class, Ferrera-Balanquet invited them to form the group. It was under Ana M. Lopez's guidance that the collective organized the Latin American Film Festival and Conference in Iowa II in 1986, which trained Ferrera-Balanquet as a curator.

We work as a collective and our productions encompass and recognize the contributions of each individual. As Latino media makers, we critique elements of the political systems affecting our social relations and cultural survival, as well as those working within our communities of belonging. (Ferrera-Balanquet, 1992).

My interest with the Latino Midwest Video Collective grew as I witnessed their work to be sources of witnessing, connection of Latino experience in a medium that I also began to work through, think of, and began the path of light.

I became familiar with Raul Moarquech Ferrera Balanquet’s video works, writings, and performances. A form of language that spoke deeply to me. I first collaborated with Raul to program one of their films, Iluminando Las Aguas (1986). A letter, the memories of the lover left behind and the performance of memories at the deep territories of Yemaya Olokun, the Yoruba deity.

I began thinking of a series of ENTRE -VISTAS // INNER - VIEWS with artists, creators and workers who inspire or aid the work of CALLE SOLEDAD PRESA to continue, and transform… Raul was the first person I thought of. And it has been such an honor to connect with them. To Listen. To See. To enter a view of interpersonal stories, histories, ancestral knowledge, powerful

Mythos, healing mystery in the morphing decoloniality of time, space and imagination. I am so grateful for my connection with Raul, as it has opened many windows, views and ways of seeing.

DIANA LIZETTE
Primero quería preguntarte. To reiterate some of the questions I have already written. Me interesa mucho la infancia de una artista, ¿De donde viene?

¿De qué te acuerdas? ¿Qué información tuviste en tu infancia qué influencia tu trabajo como artista? Y pos también que es la primera experiencia que tuviste con el arte?

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
I want to…if it 's possible to tener una referencia… okay yo me prepare para tener un video performance. [presents a photograph of their father]

Y la verdad es que, I must tell you I had a very ambivalent childhood. Because in many ways my family was very poor. I was born in a small room in what is called a Solar in Cuba.

A solar is a kind of a hall where there are rooms on each side and at the end of the hall there is a bathroom that everybody uses and shares. And in Mexico they call it a vecindad.

In many ways it's very interesting being born there because of the socio-economic situation that my family had, that also influenced the relationships my family had with the families who also lived there.

Across the room where I was born lived a woman who was from Congo. She was brought to Cuba when she was nine, and talked about her childhood as a slave.

There was a moment in my mother’s pregnancy when she became afraid of losing me so that woman did a lot of work around her pregnancy, around her belly and so when I was born, not only was I attached to this woman but to the ancestral knowledge that she carried. I didn’t know until years later what, why, how, this whole information that was transmitted to me through my mother’s belly was… I didn’t learn anything about that until I went to do my PhD. I started asking my family why I remember this woman all the time. My older sister said: “Raul, how could you remember? She died when you were two years old.”

DIANA LIZETTE
Woah.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
And I said: Everytime I smell cinnamon, she comes to my mind. My mother said: “Of course, she put cinnamon en talco.”
You know talco? The white powder that people and babies use, a powder we use in the Caribbean when there is a lot of heat. So yeah that's the smell… I am talking about this because you know it's very interesting. Not only was the transmission of knowledge occurring during my mother’s pregnancy, but I had also realized that a lot of the knowledge that I have about Afro-Cuban and memories came from what she [the congo woman] passed through me at the moment of her death.

DIANA LIZETTE
Mmh.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
So in a way my life, my spirituality and identity ...
My connections to African roots have been very very interesting and I have been saying this since I was a child. My maternal grandfather was an Afro-Haitian immigrant who came to Cuba. He immigrated when he was very young and so he met my grandmother in El Caney, a small town that they both had left. My grandmother was half Canarian and Catalanian. You can imagine the mix.

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
The mix I embody in who I am and in my soul. My maternal grandfather taught me a lot of Afro-Haitian as I was growing up, but not only that. By the time I was five years old, and I already knew most of the capitals of the world, because my grandfather taught me with maps. I realized later it was because of his immigrant self that had this notion of understanding, a large view of the world. He was passing those views to me. And at the same time, he was training me for a future as an immigrant when I was 20… I’m speculating about this, but at the same time when I look back, I realize that was somehow happening. I grew up in Cuba at a time that was very complex because of the social, I don’t want to use the word revolution because that's a term that I don’t think revolutionary people could be so patriarchal, sexist, homophobic and racist. So, I grew up in a moment of social transformation, a deep social transformation in which the white cuban criollos who were land owners like the Castros…who took power and convinced the Cubans to follow them. In a certain way this idea of the transformation provided a certain space for education and cultural development that I had growing up in Cuba, but at the same time I constantly meet people that are…. Oh God I am talking so much Diana… I have never talked about these things before. [Laughs]

DIANA LIZETTE
[Laughs] Yeah…I am so interested in this Raul.

Writing Otherwise (2012-2015) is a series of ink and watercolor drawings on Mexican hand made paper combining indigenous Kairibe imagery and West African writing simulating pages of an ancient codex.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
You know I really have to honor the collaborations we have done and how we arrived to this moment. To talk because I feel comfortable. And I admire how you are so young and immersed into all of this process because it kind of reminds me of how I was…

[Take a moment of silence, acknowledgement and smile to one another]

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
So, I am growing up in a place in which I am watching Cinema from all over the world in my neighborhood theater. My father worked with Che Guevara. Che Guevara had a team of twelve men who worked with him. Of course, that was a form of change that took place in my family because of my father working with Che Guevara. It changed the social-economics of my family, and by the time I was two and half we moved to a residential neighborhood. Where I had my own room, and I had a privilege that my brothers and sister did not grow up with… so even within the family, with my brothers and sisters, the identity and the problem with the class privilege that I grew up with that they didn’t have was always a conflict. I would complain about something and they would say OH GOD. Like I would complain about noise when I was reading and they would say: “OH GOD, You should have grown up how we did, all of us in the room trying to study and we had to detach ourselves from the noise. So don’t complain. Don’t complain.” So, I grew up really becoming aware of how the social status of my family before I was born compared to when I was growing up. My father was a very interesting figure because my father since he was sixteen was involved in clandestine social struggle and I should say social movement in Santiago de Cuba where he was born. That’s why I have his photograph on the back [points at the back of the screen]. My father was a very complex figure… His mother was an indigenous black woman and my great-grandmother was indigenous Cuban. And my father’s father was a Syrian-Lebanese immigrant who came to Cuba. So that's another mix that comes into play. My father grew up with my indigenous great-grandmother and I do believe he inherited a way of living and indigenous cultural practices. For him morality was very important and the transmission of knowledge through oral history. I learned of Cuban history through my own father’s experiences of growing up. My understanding of the total transformation was very different from the ones that were in books, and the ones people had of who's doing what. To the point and to the point that when at the age of 14, when I was in Junior High School I was imprisoned, I was taken to jail by the police for being gay. I was sent to a maximum security jail, la prisión Combinado del Este. I’m telling you this to describe the type of police persecution that I grew up with. It was constant harassment from the police. I was sent to this jail, this prison complex and my parents didn't know until a week later. And they had to pay money to take me out. I was so scared. I was so scared of my father. My father being Indigenous and of Arab descendent, he grew up with many different women, and by the time he was twenty one years old he had kids with three different women. So, I grew up with a very extended family, which is beautiful. That part is very beautiful. But, I had an understanding of my father being this very patriarchal figure until that very moment when I arrived home and my father said to me: “Hey, you know you are not wrong. They are the ones who are wrong.” In a lot of ways my father gave me, well my father and my mother, they gave me the strength to understand the dynamics that were happening outside in the streets with the government, and its homophobia that I did not have to worry about at home. That was very important. For my family education was a key issue. One because my mother only went to 6th grade. Although my father studied, he had a degree in business and administration. Later on, he became a lawyer. And for both of them, for their children to become educated was very important. In my household, all my brothers and sisters, no matter what we had to study before we went out. So, I was forced, no… [laughs] I always use that word because it becomes romantic to be forced to study. It was very interesting. Almost every day, I had to study three hours in the dining room with all the books. And then after I finished, I would go out and I wouldn’t go back home until the next morning. But, my parents didn't care because I did my responsibility. That was very important... When I was twenty and I was expelled from the university for being gay which forced me to exile… I went to Iowa where I was relocated as a refugee. I was able to enter the university thanks to the Chicano Latino community. They were the ones that made sure and figured out ways to get me into the university as a Cuban refugee. I realized that when I was studying what I was thinking, and when I was complaining about my parents forcing me to study was kind of an ethic. A learning ethnic that I inherited. I was alone and I had nobody to tell me that I had to study. That I had to do. So, then I look back and then I’m like oh my god no matter how old the contradictions that I grew up with in my family, having my parents accept my sexuality and then literally obligating all of their children to study everyday was a blessing. In a lot of ways. There's another thing I want to say about my father, the reason I became a filmmaker was because of my father and his love for cinema and culture.

DIANA LIZETTE
¡Oh, qué lindo¡

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Yes. The first time I went to the cinema I was three and half years old. My father took me and I was mesmerized with the light and movement. [Chuckles] Of course, I am telling you this but I didn't realize that… [Moves hands upward]

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes [Nods].

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
I didn’t realize this until I was in film school. And I watched in my European film history class the same I watched when I was three and half years old... [opens mouth and eyes widely]

DIANA LIZETTE
Wow… [gestures with amazement].

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
And then... The film was called Daises, its a Czechoslovakian film made by two women. You need to see it.

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes, I will watch it.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
[Gestures with excitement and gets up from chair] Because… I don’t know if it's youtube, but it's a totally experimental film, full of color and montage, a very wonderful film. And it's a woman's film which is something to look at now oh my goodness... What is my cinematic influence with women’s film... When cinema is so dominated by men. And their gaze, with their voyeuristic male gaze. So, I was in the class watching the film… and then all the memories came back and I said WOW. This is why I am here studying this. In a sense [Laughs], I became good about it, because not only did I have that experience with my family but I grew up in a country in which cinema as a cultural dynamic, social cultural dynamic was very important. For Cuban filmmakers who were running the Cuban film institute they had studied in Europe, so they had friends all over, French, Russians, Latin Americans, Argentinians, and even Hollywood filmmakers. So, all these filmmakers who were their friends would send their films to Cuba for free.

DIANA LIZETTE
Wow…

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Yeah, Wow… Wow... I didn’t learn that also until I went to film school in the States. That was the reason why I was able to see Pasolini, Fellini, Antonis, and not only the Italians, but Truffaut, the French New Wave, and Argentine filmmakers. All these directors went to school with the Cubans. So, every week the films changed, and I had all of these different films to watch. I also started going to Ballet when I was around twelve. Ballet was very inexpensive in Cuba, as the theater was too. I grew up seeing not only the Cuban national ballet. But, the ballet from Paris Opera, the ballet from the Convent Garden from London, Bolshoi from Moscow, the Ballet from La Scala Milan, and it was very inexpensive to see this. As well, it was very inexpensive to buy a book. The cost was like cents, 10, 25 cents to buy. When I entered senior high school, I had a group of friends who we hung around, some of us are still hanging around even though we are in distant places, but what I was saying is that we hung around as I would say a very intellectually motivated cultural group of friends. We used to buy, each of us used to buy a different book and then we would rotate books. We would read different books and that was really very important to me growing up in Cuba. At the same time, the repression that I experienced, and my generation, the lesbian, gay, trans, bisexual what we called … because my generation doesn’t like to call ourselves queer, because that's a white term... For many… It's a white gay boy term, so we used the word Maricon, as a political term. Some of the younger generation used the word Pajaro. You’ll see when you read about Cuban LGBT Cinema, you will read terms like Pajaro Cinema. But, yeah. Growing up in Cuba was very tense and when I look back, my generation was so political that they constantly defied the police in the public space. You would be taken to the police station at 6 o’clock in the afternoon and left out at 8 and then you just would end up back to the public spaces. This whole thing about being a collective and being visible, no matter what was very important for my generation. It was a contradiction to me when I arrived in the United States and the gay people went to the darkest spaces, like the club and they did not congregate in public spaces. Like my generation gay and lesbian, trans Cubans did. As an adolescent, a young gay man going to university and not only for me, but it was not easy to get into the university. You had to, the whole thing with the GPA was a big thing. But if you entered the university and you finished, had your college degree, that was a way to advance class status. You would become a professional, you were going to have not just decent but a really good salary at that time. Doctors and architects could buy a car with their salaries. So, my generation had placed all their hopes into getting a college degree. And in 1980, when the Peruvian embassy was invaded by some of the Cubans who wanted to leave the country, and Castro publicly declared those who were at the embassy, they called them blandidos, gay mens... So the government and institutions, and the university’s student association proceed to what was called cleansing assemblies, or cleansing meetings. In which, not only the gay and lesbians, bisexuals, not the trans because the trans were not allowed to go to universities. That was something, I reflect back with my trans friends, they were as we know, the most prosecuted people. Which is still today. Some of my friends in High School were trans and drag, and some of us became like the technical crew of the drag shows. I used to do the lighting and stage design, not only with me, but also with my friend Mandy, and Orlando for the drag shows and for our friends who were part of those shows. You know we had the shows, but also the police came to the shows. And there was a lot of running away from the police when they arrived at the house where these drag shows and drag performance were taking place. So, what I am saying is that I knew then that trans people were not allowed to the universities. The cleansing meetings took place and we all got expelled. Not only the gays and lesbians, bisexuals but also the Catholics, Jehovah Witnesses, the women who had boyfriends who were foreign students were accused of being whores in front of everybody. When I arrived home that day, I was very depressed because there was no future. And my family got very depressed, the whole generation got really depressed because that's how we were forced into exile. I was twenty years old. So that’s part of my childhood.

DIANA LIZETTE
Ay. Wow. Es muy... I don’t know es muy bonito escuchar the connections you have made later in your life. The understanding. The capacity to bring back memory but also a deeper understanding to the self.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Mhmm.

DIANA LIZETTE
Fue muy bonito escuchar. Muchas gracias. I really appreciate that. Es mucha información… [Laughs]

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
[Laughs too]

DIANA LIZETTE
But so touching to hear because as you speak and as I have been able to engage with some of your work puedo ver esos momentos, esos detalles en tu trabajo.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET

Si. Si. Si.

Kairibexeri (2013-2016). Hand Made Book. Waterclor, Ink Drawing, Lettering, Collage, Photography, Xerox, Printing. 5″ x 7″.

DIANA LIZETTE
Y todo está allí. Todo esta como que unveiling and revealing itself at different times. Es como cuando ves un... Y esto es lo que me encanta de Cinema and watching a film, cuando ves algo la primera vez y luego lo ves otra vez, you receive a new message. You receive something else. And I love how you have had the experience of being a filmmaker at school at a different location, a place so far away from home, different space, different time of your life after experiencing so much and yet still bring back these aspects of childhood into your work. It’s like you are receiving knowledge constantly from different parts to guide these newer parts.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Mhm. Mhm. But you know Cinema and Memory are the same in the imagination. The interesting thing is that in Indigenous culture and African diaspora culture, the memory is what really carries survival. Memory for me, as I went to film school, is something I understood later on because of the suffering of exile. I was not able to go back to Cuba. But, I had to remember. Everything, every detail, every smell... The exile was pushing me to express through cinema what was going on in my imagination. I didn’t know that at that moment but when I look back, I realize that even in my fictional spaces the way I create fiction has to do with personal experiences. I transform everything into something else that you can not imagine that happened to me, but I know it happened to me and that's what and where I took my inspiration.

DIANA LIZETTE
Yeah. One of the other questions I had and I know you mentioned this briefly is la experiencia de llegar, ir a Iowa. Luego también conectarte con la gente Chicana, Chicano, Chicanx. ¿Como pudiste, in your own way bringing your memories to survive, but how was that space and landscape of Iowa informing what do I even have to survive? ¿Que tengo que sobrevivir? Not just what you survived in Cuba, but what other forms of survival came next?

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Yeah. Woah. That's really interesting because when I arrived as a refugee to Iowa city. The Chicano community was the one in charge of helping the Cuban refugees. So, the head of the Chicano community was a woman, María Martínez Cano, bless her soul and her spirit. Maria was the head of social translation, bilingual interpretation at the university hospital. I was in her office two or three weeks after I had arrived and she asked me: “So, what Raul? What are you going to do? What do you want to do?” It was very interesting because I relocated to Iowa through the Catholic agencies and also they were a social program by the administration of Jimmy Carter called CETA, C-E-T-A, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, that provides funds for underserved people to work, to be hired by different companies. So the woman who was in charge of that Catholic refugee agency found me a job at an electrical engineering company, because I was studying architecture in Cuba and I only needed a year and a few months to become an architect. I was a good Draftsman, and this woman took me to the electrical engineering company and they did a test, and they said my drafting skills were good, and the owner hired me. At the same time, I am celebrating that with Maria, and Maria says: But, what do you want to do? I said to her I want to go to school. I did not know there was a school when I arrived in Iowa City, a very old 1800s big ten university, highly respected all over the world, as I know now. Okay. Maria said: Really, Raul? And I said: Yes. And so Maria, it was around October, the end of October, beginning of November so she grabbed her sweater and held my hand. We walked across campus to the Special Support Center Services that was also led by Chicanos and Puerto Ricans. Maria said: “Raul wants to go to school. We need to figure out a way to get Raul into the university.” So, a Puerto Rican guy, his name was Greg Medina, who was the head of special support services. He said: “Okay Raul if you pass the TOEFL examination. I can prove that you know English and I can argue that you went to school in Cuba, but as you came as a refugee you don’t have any papers. If you come into the university, you can take certain exams to fulfill the requirements, like Math and Science. But, you have to pass the TOEFL.” And Maria said: Oh no that's not a problem. I will see you soon. We got out of the special support building and Maria took me all the way to a Lutheran church. Where in the basement there was an English As the Second Language class. Okay. So, my teacher, who was a Jewish woman named Vida Verner, (42:07), I’m never going to forget her name because when Maria told her I needed to learn English I could go to school. That woman... If my father was really hard, pushing me to study… That woman...

DIANA LIZETTE
[Begins laughing]
Raul Moarquech Ferrera Balanquet: [Laughs] That woman was... [Laughs] That was like... Like before I went to sleep, I had to watch the news with Johnny Carson, that I don’t know if you know who Johnny Carson is.

DIANA LIZETTE
[Laughs and nods her head no]

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Well, you know Jimmy Kramel now?

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
That program used to be Johnny Carson in the 80s, early 80s. So I had to watch him, and then watch the news after Johnny Carson. The evening news, or it was the news and then Johnny Carson. I don’t know but I had to watch. The next morning when I went to class, at 8 o’clock, I had to, in my broken English, tell the teacher what I heard in the news and Johnny Carson. When I finished, she gave me the New York Times, and the Press Citizens so then I had to read both newspapers, and with my English Dictionary… Because she did not let me translate anything. Which was a blessing, because later on when I started teaching Spanish, I never let my students, and made my students to be confident that they have to be within the language. Because if you translate you get lost. Being a translator is a skill that you have to go to school and study. I did not know at that time, but my teacher was forcing me into the English context. I had the dictionary so, everytime I did not know, or recognize a word in the newspaper, I had to underline and look at the dictionary. Not only was I understanding the word, but I also was understanding the synonyms.

Figuring it out. To make the story short, that was November, I took the TOEFL examination at the end of March, and I passed. I went back with my TOEFL certificate to Special Support Services and in the Fall of 1981, I was a student at the University of Iowa. That was… you know that happened a month after I arrived.

I want to go back to Maria, and the Latino community and the Chicano community because one of the keys and the privileges as a Cuban-American that I have was not be in Miami with the right-wing politicians. I understand how the United States, what is now called the United States, is and was always in occupied Mexican territory, and the whole migration of the Mexican-Americans is that the border crossed them.

They did not cross the border, all the way to Colorado. I was with the Chicano community learning, and with the Puerto Ricans teaching me about Puerto Rico as a colonized State of the United States. I was a Latinx being radicalized by my communities and at the same time I’m going to school.

It was a privilege and it was a blessing to have my community provide me with a socio historical background.

And Maria constantly told me: “Don’t forget who you are because if you forget you are going to get lost. You are going to get assimilated.”

That was a valuable teaching, still today that I realize that has helped me to be so successful.

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Is that I didn't forget who I am. I learned more of who I was through what I chose in my studies. I choose to study Latin American and Chicano Cinema. I chose to study African Art. I chose to study Latin American, Chicano Literature. I chose African-American, African Diaspora Literature and Theater. Understanding who I was, I chose these courses that were really, somehow not only relating to my cultural heritage. I wanted to read, and it's at the moment in which I am at the film school that is very interesting. In the beginning I suffered a lot of marginalization, because of my accent. When I was in my second year my European Film professor, Ed Lowry, rest in peace. He died of AIDS. I already had my way of expressing, verbally expressing my idea because the film he was showing in class, I had already seen the film back in Cuba when I was growing up. It was easy for me to talk about the film, and all the film directors. I was so interested in Cinema, and I knew and I learned. When at midterm, the professor, Ed Lowry, said you have to write this 10 page paper, I went to his office and told him: Professor, I’m really sorry but I am going to drop your class. He went like: “Why?” And I said because I have problems writing. And he said: “Oh No Honey! you are not…” he didn’t say honey, but [Laughs].

DIANA LIZETTE
[Begins laughing too]

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
He used a term of endearment. He said: “No, No, No, No, You are not going to drop my class. I am going to give you an oral examination.” And, pointing to the river, he added “There is the English writing lab where you need to go, in that building.” It was next to the Film School. I passed my European Film class with a B. I started going to the English writing lab, and my love for writing in English began to flourish. Began study at the University of Iowa’s Research Institution where I was being paid to research and to write. By the time I was in my third year, I started taking more complex film theory classes, and film criticism with the head of the department, Dudley Andrew. Dudley Andrew, somehow got very astonished by my knowledge of Cinema. The film school and the Spanish department wanted, and were fighting for a professor for Latin American and Chicano Cinema. Dudley Andrew and Tom Lewis, who was the head of the Spanish, who years later, maybe one or two.. I stayed six years in my undergraduate… I used all my grant programs but I didn’t know what would happen. Years later, Tom Lewis was my comparative literature professor, and well you know, bless his heart that man. Tom called me to Dudley’s Andrews office and told me: “Raul, we need you to create a Latin American film festival.” I was alike I don't do anything about organizing a festival. And they said: “Oh! don’t worry about it, you are gonna go to the conference center, and they are going to teach you everything. Because you know the films, and you are going to use the phone to call the filmmakers, and they are going to teach you everything.” So, at the conference center they taught me, thanks to Dudley and Tom, they taught me to be a curator. I was the director of the Latin America, the international film festival and conference. I had not finished my Bachelor’s degree in Cinema yet.

Still from Iluminado Las Aguas (1986) 

 Still from  Merida Poscrita

DIANA LIZETTE
That’s so beautiful. So many experiences. From learning English from this one teacher, who then years later also her practices and her teachings helped you, and shaped you to become a better teacher or Spanish teacher. And then to have this opportunity to have been given to you at a point you had not finished your Bachelors, but the openness of your teachers, your colleagues, your friends, everyone wanting for you to have a blessed experience.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
I want to acknowledge that it seems very beautiful. But at the same time, I was experiencing racism and homophobia. The film school had a few Latinos, there were no black students, it was very segregated. There were many parts of the university and of the State at that time. I don’t know. It's a very convoluted situation, and ambivalent in many ways, but at the same time yes, I had that blessing. You know the other day, it's not funny but an interesting thing but now the Cinematic Arts Department in the University of Iowa, I am among the ten most recognized Alumni. And they place me on their website. Which is interesting because of my starting there as an undergraduate that I became a curator, and I have the job that I have right now. The University of Iowa was, that was my undergraduate and then I went to do Masters and I went to the Art School. I changed. I went across the river because the Art School was across the river. I went to study Multimedia Arts, performance with Hans Breder. Was one of the greatest minimalist German artists of the 60s and early 70s, who was the first husband of Ana Mendieta. Hans had already, because Ana had a knowing insight into Cuban art. When he saw my art he said: “Oh you are in.” But Hans because of and that is written in some places you know the relationship with Ana, Hans was very much into Carlos Castaneda and all that kind of…do you know Carlos Castaneda book?

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes I do.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Yeah. Yeah. The learning of Don Juan which is this philosophy of finding yourself and expressing yourself. And in the 70s Hans and the whole students, he guided the students to Oaxaca and into Mesoamerican Art. He had an understanding of the importance of being you as an artist, which was very influential to me at the moment when I went to graduate school, and I have to produce my work from my experience, from me. Because you can not. I don’t know how to put this. My graduate inter-media department was a close community, in a sense there was not a lot of space for many students. So the number of students never changed. If two students graduated there were only two students allowed to get in. It was a community. It is also really good to me because I learned so much from my classmates. A lot of different things. I remember once, my studio mate, Bonnie Sparling, was into wrapping things, so I began to wrap things. The people who were not into video, I would teach them how to do the camera, and the framing. We were constantly in that, everyone was into something completely different from each other. The interesting part of being part of this community is that we all learned from each other. We had our own vocabulary, our own way of being, and I should say visual and audiovisual discourse. It came from our experiences. It was key to have a professor who was more into developing the self, the self as a spiritual, self expression.

Writing Otherwise (2012-2015) is a series of ink and watercolor drawings on Mexican hand made paper combining indigenous Kairibe imagery and West African writing simulating pages of an ancient codex.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
My art teachers were like that. Our painting teacher David Dunlap, he used to give us these exercises where we were only allowed to use five colors. Everyone had the same five colors requirement to produce, but we were allowed to produce whatever we wanted. He never told us you have to paint landscape or abstract. When we all came back from the assignment we found different colors in our own expressions. That was really beautiful. We would talk about how we all got a certain color, but when the assignment was given, we complained that how is this white color we're going to use? I was one of those who were very outspoken because being Cuban and the tropical Caribbean I wanted you to know [Spreads their arms wide, gesturing the widens and excitement] And when I was given these colors… I was like…And in a certain way that was the philosophy of the art school at University of Iowa. The professors were rigorous about techniques, about forms, well not form, I should say tools and techniques, the understanding. In the intermedia they used to say every time you don’t know, go back to drawing, go back to drawing and not drawing with the pencil, you could be drawing with a nail or drawing with your body. With whatever. But back to drawing, back to the basic, back to the basics. There’s always that idea that professionalizing your techniques of the media was what is most important to develop your self-expression as an artist.

DIANA LIZETTE
Mhmm… And one question I have is that by developing your own spirit and like your own sense of being an artist and still holding a lot of the memories that come with into this country. How does ritual or how did ritual have a key component in developing that spirit?

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Well, I was in the inter media arts program and performing was part of it. What I begin to do was to develop my performing practice through my Indigenous and Afro-Caribbean ancestry. I transformed or I substituted, in a certain way, performance for ritual and ceremonies. That is how I begin to integrate all the ancestral practice because the New Yorkers, the artists they think they invented performance in the 60s, since they don't know Egyptians, Greeks, Mayans, Aztecas and so many other Indigenous people they have been doing performance for centuries and centuries. We know as those western Europeans, they came out of the dark ages and they did not know a lot of shit.

DIANA LIZETTE
[Laughs]

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
But until now they’re figuring out that the Indigenous people were right about the environment. Now! After they have fucked up the world. But, anyway. That's what happened. That's what happened… I also began to develop a different way of doing things like I don’t use realism at all when I draw or paint. When you see my drawings, it is an exploration of those ancestral cultures. That always goes through my body and through the Caribbean to the Indigenous, to the Mesoamericans, and the West Africans. And when I do films, I dive more into social issues and somehow that you don't see that kind of say that way of drawing and expressing in my films. I do have the camera, and understand the media itself, how it serves me for doing different things. Even when I did my printmaking, I was in school and I did it because I was allowed to do that. When I look at the foundational structures of my work, even my videos and their sociopolitical videos like my gay cinema… It is very rooted in indigenous and West African spirituality. Because binarity doesn’t exist either in Indigenous or in the West African imagination. Gender is a western construction. When I do what I call, Maricon Cinema, I have foundation, an understanding that the deities that I've been venerating and growing, they have different sexualities. And my critical discourse from to my critical discourse to patriarchy and homophobia come from an understanding, a different understanding that is not a modern patriarchal binary understanding of sexuality. So they all are connected. Although they look different. But they are connected.

Abuela Tula (2001) Ink and Color Pencil on Paper.

Bonampak (2011) Ink and Color Pencil on Paper.

Jose Humboltd Park (2003) Ink and Color Pencil on Paper.

DIANA LIZETTE
Yeah. It's interesting and this is me speaking from my own personal experience. But it's a practice to continue consistently existing in decolonial thinking and forms. And be in that presence and understanding and yet also be in a relationship or in relation to the environment that we live in. Especially in this country which is founded in white supremacy and imperialist thinking. It’s sort of sometimes very difficult to continue your own process and ways of thinking.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Yes. It is difficult but also this is what I learned from four important people in my life. My father told me the reason why I was caught by the police in Cuba is because I played, I gave them too much attention and too much of my energy. My father was an underground clandestine, urban guerilla man. So when he put the bomb, after he put the bomb, he passed by the police like nothing happened and then the bomb BOOM. [Gestures an explosion], he went away. So, I learned that from him to be able to understand the complexity of the social space that I lived in and what are the survival mechanisms that I need to produce in order to be sane. But, also when I arrived in Iowa, the Chicanos also told me that. And the women. The women who I didn't mention were the women of the Latino and the African-American community, the lesbian, and the women who had a group called Women Against Racism. I learned during my undergraduate how to understand the complex power dynamics of the colonists. I realized that there was nothing wrong with me, it was them. I say this now it becomes really sad to see how much this administration is opposing the idea of diversity. Being the greatest power of this nation is the multi-ethnic community. That truly supports the idea of what this country is. And then having an administration and a group of people that they do not understand. They want to continue rationalizing and dividing the country. It's really interesting to see that they are in power, but at the same time are still thinking like it was the 40s. They don’t realize how the country has changed and how the people have changed, and their failure is going to be their own ignorance. As we are constantly seeing every day when Trump talks, ICE goes against the Latinos and Asians, and constantly… Of how they are becoming in the public space, the people are disliking the administrations because of their actions. And they don’t have an awareness that they are their own enemies. Producing this spectacle of violence, of social violence in which everything in one way or another... I don’t know when because we cannot predict... But the complexities of this empire, it has always the power of understanding that multi-ethnicity, even during the time that there was slavery this was happening. Or the time where north of Mexico was occupied by the gringos. In many ways these complexities of different culture always trying to intertwine and entangle among themselves in order to create other dynamics that make the empire move into different directions. Our fantasy of bringing the country back is, sometimes to me, it is funny. It's sad. It's sad because it reminds so much of Cuba. Now when I go to the street and see the police in Washington D.C. and see the army, I go like shit. Patriarchy is no different, no matter what you supposedly call yourself ideologically it's still patriarchy. Only patriarchy could create social violence in the social space. That imposition of power, of that performance of power. Not knowing that people have a way to avoid them and keep doing whatever they want. But, anyway. That's deep. Because I never expected coming to this country that this was going to happen. I had aspirations of the country transforming itself and becoming. A kind of empire knowing that I live in an empire but becoming an empire of the 21st century. Of not going back to being an empire of the 1800s. They have lost.

DIANA LIZETTE
That kind of... You saying that brings up grief. And a little bit hurt. Isn't what my grandparents and great grandparents came here for? That other... The growth not that return back because it's been through so many generations and so much immigration to this country aspiring to become something they felt that their own country could become, or be, or offer. But, now we are here reiterating those patterns.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Yeah. But it is up to us. Because our great grandparents… although sometimes it's really this country... The Mexican and the Chicanos were not immigrants. They were here. They did not cross the border. Okay. So, we have to be aware of that. And Indigenous people they were all over.

DIANA LIZETTE
They were always here.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Yes. So our grandparents, or great grandparents were here. And they were the ones that migrated to this country. I think Diana, that we need to really hold on and understand that our power is this knowing. Our generations do understand the complexities of this sociopolitical dynamics that our previous generation were not fully aware of. And so our power is there, not into going into the street and fighting because that means to be again, being into the binary. And the bad. What can we do as a community within our own way of networking, connecting, producing, doing things, in which we don’t become visible. Our generation, your generation knows how to do that. That is going to be a powerful tool to bring them down. Not confronting them but making us stronger. Yes, in a very convoluted complex historical time. But you know if our grandparents survived… And they didn’t have... Became educated in the way we did now that we are. I just imagine you know what is going to be in the future. Not only for us, but for our communities. The work that is going to happen during these dark times. It's going to happen today, they're just going to think it will sink down. Se van a hundir en su propia mierda.
But anyways, what else? [Laughs]

DIANA LIZETTE
[Laughs] Um, I feel like I want to go back just to one section and maybe we can start wrapping some things up after this, but I want you to talk a little bit about the Latino Midwest Video Collective.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Oh. Yeah.

DIANA LIZETTE
You know I enjoy and no siempre he pensado porque no comencé un colectivo? Entonces las aspiraciones de crear, con lo que creaste con el colectivo. And the connections and the relationships.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
The collective came organically. We all were going to school like I said, there were no black students going to film school, and there were a couple of chicanos from Iowa: Joel Castel and Carlos Rojas; Chilean women, Adriana Zuanic and Carmen Chile; Olivero Rivera Davila who was Puerto Rican, a Venezuelan woman, Jacqueline Rangel and me.

It came organically and at the same time the white boys didn’t want to work with us. Somehow as Latinos, we were, and not only us at the film school, but at the university, there were such a few Latinos that we all knew each other. We had what was called Chicano, Native, Latino Center. We all called it Chicano House, but it had a different name. It was for all of us, our refuge. Then we arrived at a point, I think it was our junior year, we began to do productions and then we began to help each other. It was very interesting. It was really interesting because we all had the sense of being in the collective and working in the collective. I was the only one who could make my films to be a production of the collective. In whatever, no matter, like Joe’s films or Adriana's film, Carlos films, we all worked together and only in that sense of collectiveness. It just grew organically. Even then things flourish after the festival [Refers to the Latin American Festival Raul Directed in Iowa]. It was the night of the festival, the Latin American film festival that I organized open. I decide that the opening night because all these big-time filmmakers, Latin American filmmakers and Puerto Rican were coming to the university, we have to show our short films because the reason why… they have to know, they needed to know there was this festival because there were this group of Latinos who were studying there. It was that night when we realized that we had produced our work as a collective. Even though I was the director in my film, Joe in his film, and Adriana's in hers. We were a collective. We had a sense of collectivity. We knew since the other guys didn't want to work with us, and the funny thing. This is funny. And don’t put it there.

DIANA LIZETTE
Okay.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Or don’t write this down...

DIANA LIZETTE
Okay

[The conversation continues privately.]

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
We didn’t have money to make films. We had to make films really short... Because during that time it was Film and there was no video. And the film was really expensive. It was really expensive! To have to shoot and then send it to the lab, get the negative back, do the print and cut the print, send it back to cut the negative And OOOOOOOOOO honey, it was... And I cried every time. I was the poorest of the poorest. But that’s how organically it came.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
I wasn’t allowed to return to Cuba. So, I finally got to go to Cuba. I meet many Cuban filmmakers in different festivals. I’m showing my gay work and these Cubans who are well known filmmakers who also were gay, were not allowed to do gay films. Because my work is so complex in ways in which I bring sexuality into class and race, in cultures and multi ethnicity. They told me that was the kind of thing they wanted to do. But in Cuba, the government had this discourse that homosexuality was a sin of capitalism. Of the imperial... That was their shit... So they asked me if I wanted to go and I was like God I had been 10 years without going back home. The Cuban filmmaker, Ivan Arocha, who I met in Chicago, figured out a way to get me in and do a retrospective of my work in Havana. I’m Havana in the film festival and Adriana Zuanic, who had gone back to Chile, and then, she is there at the office of the film festival’s director, Pastor Vega, and then our Latin American cinema professor from Iowa, Ana Lopes is there too. And then we find out that Olivero Rivera who was the Puerto Rican guy who studied in Iowa was going to school at the San Antonio Cuban film school. So we all got together in Havana. Then, through conversations, it came out the idea to write the manifesto [ Latino Midwest Video Collective Manifesto]. Now I’m going to rewind a little bit because what happened was that in the mid 80s when I was doing the festival and during that time I was also part of Public Access Television in my community in Iowa City that was at the library. All of us were part of that. And one of my roommates who was a graduate student in the film department, Gloria Williams, she was connected with Deep Dish TV and Paper Tiger Television who were in New York. Deep Dish TV was a satellite television station and I became a producer for Deep Dish TV even being in Iowa. By the time, in the 90s when I finished my masters and went to Chicago, I was the producing coordinator for the Caribbean and Latin American of Deep Dish Television. We were on satellite television. And honey, in 1990, I had an email. Okay. Well, nobody knew what that was. Okay. So, that trained me to become a new media artist. And by the time that the net art things came out, I was living in the Bay Area. So I got trained at the San Francisco’s Bay Area Video Coalition to do internet net art and programming, and work in digital photoshop, illustrator and all of that. I became a new media artist when the internet was like this [Makes a small egg with both hands]. I was connected all over the world with many people, so I began to travel because of that artistic community. I wanted, somehow bring that sense of collectiveness because when I became a new media artist there were only a few, very few Latinos, Ricardo Dominguez and Antonio Mendoza doing new media. Then it became a kind of collective or a network, a community network, who really pushed me to become a new media curator and do the biennial [Arte Nuevo Interactiva] I organized in Media, Yucatan Mexico from 2001 to 2013. I not only knew the Latino new media artists, but I knew the media artists almost all over the world. Because of the internet, but also my previous working with Deep Dish Television, and giving all that knowledge in that meeting. The technical understanding that I had previous to the turn of the century and when the century came up, I already had a set of skills that even today the generation that have cellphones, and that are constantly taking pictures, when I talk to them about web programming, they don’t have a clue… The collective then, what I also find very fascinating, in which... It is sad because Adriana is not here. I’m thinking about her so much I think about her spirit. But that there is now a resurgence of the collective and the collective work because the work was done. I mean we got recognized nationally and internationally since that time so that is the young generation who’s coming back like one day when you came and wanted to screen the film Iluminando las Aguas, I was like who the hell are you?

DIANA LIZETTE
[Laughs}

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
How have you seen my work? What do you do? But it's really interesting to see how the younger generation now are searching for all this material and to realize that the work they are doing now… They have a history

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Their own community of producing media work. Of gay and lesbian Latinx media work, so they can connect to it and produce, do curatorial programs and dissertations and stuff like that. It’s very exciting because I look back to us being, forming working in our films during that time and understanding that we couldn’t do what we did if it were not a community, so supportive the way we were during that time. Even during the time it was not the issues of community and networking it was not the thing to do. And how it became later on forming a collective. But I don’t think it's ever too late... Creating a collective. Collective are formed for different reasons and in different ways... You can form a collective with your friends, with your lover, and the friends you and your lovers... You know I hardly talk about my love life during going to school but when I went, I had my boyfriend, Victor Raigoza, a Chicano medical student who was hardcore into politics. Latino politics. Although he was not in the Latino Midwest Collective, I had a collective with him. Hardcore into Latino sexuality and Latino politics and that was another kind of collective that even today he kept... Sometimes when we talk about it and I say: Honey, I was strong because you were there.

DIANA LIZETTE
Oh.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
We went to school in a very white school. The white guys had these racist fantasies about us. It were disgusting. Disgusting. But because we had each other, we had a sex safe, healthy sexual space, an intimate space that also was kind of a collective community. And then we had the Latino lesbians like Papusa Molina and the Chicano lesbians like Rusty Barcelo that were our Godmothers. Our god.. No no Godmother. Yeah. Godmother but fairy godmothers... And this is something that you should write it down. Okay. Because honey, Gloria Anzaldua was in Iowa City writing Borderlands and the Aunt Lute press was in Iowa city, the one that published Borderlands. I was during graduate school I was roommate, well my very first friend at the University of Iowa who is from Yucatan, from Merida, she’s a lesbian hardcore feminist Papusa Molina. Papusa was editing the Spanish sections in Gloria Anzaldua's Borderlands. So many days I had lunch with Gloria and all the hardcore Latino and African-American black feminists in that house. So I was trained about borderland and border thinking before the book came out.

DIANA LIZETTE
Wow...

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Yes... wow...wow. When I think how ancestral memory is so important for me and not only I’m saying about this but now, looking back, as I told you about the Chicano house was a safe heaven Native Americans, Chicanos, and Latino communities. Like in my second year and we are at the Chicano house and one of the guys comes to me and Said: “oh Raul, you are so Indian! I was alike what do you mean? “Oh! you just talk like an Indian you go here, there boom boom boom boom. You are not speaking like the whites. They all, the white guys need to go to the point, go to the point, go to the point, go to the point.” I was 22 and then the image of my great grandmother just came back over me and the sense of gratitude of being recognized by an Indigenous person that I am Indigenous too. It was key and it solidify my identity because those Native American students, what I learned in that house, because there are also a lot of Chicano who are also Native Americans. So the whole connection... I learned about the connections of Indigenous across the Americas, it wasn’t from school or the books, it was there at the Chicano House. It was very important, as important as meeting Gloria Anzaldua. It was like some of them began to teach me things about the country which I didn’t know about the Manifest of Destiny, and about the pushing of the Indigenous from the East all the way, all of that I learned there talking at the Chicano House because those were the conversations we had as a community. Of understanding and having a political understanding of who we were and what was the history. I look back and say, I have, in Yoruba they call it ASHE, which is luck with love and opportunity and blessings. I think about how my great grandmother, Indigenous grandmother, found a way for me to arrive there, and my African ancestors to arrive there... Because otherwise I don’t see another explanation that having those ancestral powerful forces to take me there, and provide me not only the school education but the community education that I got and formed the basis of who I am. And who I become through the years as a person and as an artist, a scholar and a curator.

[They both take a moment of silence]

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Black people understand when I talk about this and Indigenous people too and they say yeah that’s why you got there. Other people say... Oh that witchcraft… okay whatever. When I think about oh yes. I think about my Afro Haitian grandfather, the teachings of maternal grandfather that I thought was witchcraft until I’m as undergraduate taking West Africa class and my professor, Christopher Roy, comes and says, “Oh, Raul, you should study this and this and this group because they are the ones that went to Cuba and the Caribbean.” Then, I start seeing everything my grandfather was teaching me… and then I realized it came from high civilized culture what I have learned from my grandfather. I had to recognize and say, God, the Cuban government and the kind of education I had in Cuba was a very White education. Because that was considered, as growing up, witchcraft… I didn’t give the culture value that knowledge deserved. So I kept it away until I was in college in Iowa, and I realized that I have been trained in that spiritual world and that knowledge since I was a kid. I then took it and I embraced it and say, this is me. I really hope you know this would be really great when you publish this. It could be a book.

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes, I think so...

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Even a small book. Woah.

DIANA LIZETTE
Who, who, what's the photograph behind you? Who is the person?

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Oh that’s my father. I was going to do a performance of my background. [Changes background photograph to a beach, ocean water] This is a Cuban beach, Santa Maria de Mar, that's the gay and lesbian and trans beach during my childhood, we used you know defy the power. This is a page for the book.

Kairibexeri (2013-2016). Hand Made Book. Waterclor, Ink Drawing, Lettering, Collage, Photography, Xerox, Printing. 5″ x 7″.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
[Changes photographs] This is the backyard in my house in Merida. It’s my refuge. I bought this house in 1990s. Oh, when I move with Papusa Molina, the hardcore lesbian feminist that has been my friend since I entered the University of Iowa. She went from Merida to Iowa, to study school administration. We later married in 1989. We are still married today because in our generation many of us used to do that... [Laughs] Which it was great because it was our way of building community and being an alternative family in many ways. At least the Latinos and the African-Americans used to do that. I went to the Bay Area 1997 because she was living there, so I went there and I told you I got trained in new media, but I also won a Fulbright Fellowship to go to the Dominican Republic to teach internet design and programming. One of my best friends from graduate school at the University of Iowa, Ivan Mancebo, is from the Dominican Republic, he's a big time businessman. I didn’t spend a lot of my money because of Fulbright because most of the time I had an office in his building. I was even having lunch all the time at his house and on weekends, he took me and his wife traveling all over the island because he has business. So I saved a lot of money and so when I came back, I had this money and a friend of mine was selling a house and I had the money in the bank I said boom boom. I bought the house in Merida, it is a wonderful place and you are welcome and invited.

DIANA LIZETTE
Ay gracias Raul.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
And the beach is really close, it's only 20 min. [Changes the photograph] This is from my performance in Berlin. It’s called Mariposa Ancestral Memory.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n95bMl-A4Nw] 

DIANA LIZETTE
Oh yes, I have seen this performance before.

Mariposa Ancestral Memory (2013-2015). Ceremonial Media Performance. 

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
This one is from Afro-Yucatecos. [ LINK TO PERFORMANCE ]

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
From a performance that was in Merida. This is another collective in Merida with Afro descendants and Afro Yucatatecos [https://afroyucatecxs.wordpress.com/ ] . Some of the were my friends and I got hired to teach African diaspora studies at the UNAM in Merida. And then two of my friends begin to say oh I’m Afromexican, and one of them I already knew because of his hair but he had light skin but I never mentioned it. And then I met other ones and we did a performance called Afroyucatecxs: Memorias Vivas. [Changes photograph] In 2011, no in 2006 I became part of the decolonial group. The decolonial group started having different exhibitions and meetings. Bogota was the first one and then the second one was in Durham at Duke University. When were at Duke University I present a performance Nomad Dreams / Sueños Nómadas,[ https://dreamsnomadas.wordpress.com/ ] which is about migration and its based, inspired by Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands and Édouard Glissant’s The Poetic of Relation. I told Walter Mignolo that I wanted to study with him because I went to a white university and a lot of my art learning has been through coloniality and modernity, in western European, even though I have done my work in other ways. I wanted to study with him and two weeks later Mignolo called me and said I found a fellowship for you to do a PhD. So I went, I left everything. I was the head of the Intermedia Arts department at ESAY, the University of Art in Merida, Mexico. I say to everybody goodbye because the PhD, and in Duke University, no way, I’m not going to say no. Before I went to Duke, I begin to go out with a Mayan, a Yucatec Mayan poet. His name is Isaac Esau Carillo Can. Well-known poet... We had known each other for a few years, he was working in a government office that was headed by Verónica García, another writer who is part of my yucateco writers collective, Centro Yucateco de Escritores A.C. And I used to do a lot of collaboration with the office, so I used to go there you know and I used to see him and have coffee, and one day he said: “Raul, I’m into you.” And I was like honey, you know, I mean he was like 30 years, no not 30 years, maybe 25 years younger than me or less no during that time was… But you know I knew him and I said well, let’s see what happens. We went to my house and tried to have sex, and suddenly he had already won a national prize. He has a novel, I can, well you read Spanish?

DIANA LIZETTE
Si

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
I can send it to you because he did a bilingual novel in Spanish and Maya. He was the national prize on Indigenous language, el premio Nezahualcóyotl, so we are in bed and we are talking about his novel and you know and all of that, and then somehow we realized, we came here to have sex and we are here naked talking. It was really beautiful because we figured out that we have created, we knew each other, and so it became a space of intimacy that was lovely. So, I go to Duke to study with Mignolo, I go to school and the graduate school at the admission office. They said, “Okay, Raul, you have to have three languages to get your PhD.” I was in the Roman studies department, so it’s kind of a language dominant. “You already know English, and you already know Spanish, you need a third one.” Here is the list. And Yucatec Mayan was on the list. Okay. Talking about ancestors. My Indigenous Caribe great grandmother came back to you know, after I went to Maya class in Yucatan, I realized that was another way in which my Indigenous identity began to flourish. Because the Maya, the Mayan classes were not only about language it was also about culture. It was during the summer, it was the summer program and my boyfriend, also in bed, used to help me with my language assignments. I became, you know, really good at Yucatec Maya. This is one of the drawings.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Isaac died. He used to go to Mexico City, that was his work to do copyright stuff for the Yucatan Cultural state. It was really cold, and it got really… It was really sad because for the second time in my life I was in love. Truly a kind of love that was, at the same time, we recognized our age difference and of course I was his daddy and he was my papito and we played around. We both were writers, artists, the level of communication that we had on an intellectual level, it was just amazing. Amazing. So, when I was at Duke, it happened that in his novel, in the preface of his novel ,Walter Mignolo’s name was there. He was being quoted. So I take the novel to Mignolo, and Mignolo takes the novel to all the Indigenous Mayan professors at Chapel Hill and then Isaac is being invited. So we spent all those five years, time in Merida, in Durham, back and forth. A very enriching time, I also wanted to say and especially say about this performance Mariposa Ancestral Memory, because Mignolo called me to offer the fellowship to study, he told me the requirement that I will do my dissertation, my research, but at the same time from my research I will be writing my dissertation, and producing artworks. Mariposa Ancestral Memory was the result of my research. I think I was in my second or third year of my PhD. And I was doing my research on my Afro Haitian grandfather, and Afro culture and linking all of migration together. When I was admitted at the university, I agreed to defend my thesis at a gallery in Duke with all the artwork that I produced during my PhD and defense, my written dissertation. My research was about decolonizing my creative process. I had a series of pieces, there’s another piece that is called Soldado de la Memoria, I had some... Recently... If you look at my Instagram I had an exhibition in Merida. There is this photograph of this Indigenous, a series of photographs and also a video. Isaac also did a performance. It's all part of this project, there are five, no nine photographs of Isaac performing in a Mayan site where I produced the video and the photographs there.

It's called Soldados de la Memoria. I did after this piece of Mariposa ancestral memory. This is another way to understand how a community works, and a collective in ways, not only do collectives work to produce something collectively but also can be a community of sharing knowledge. In many ways I had a lot of great grief when Isaac died, I’m still really missing him in a lot of ways. It was enriching and so poetic, Diana, Isaac used to call me and recite poems before saying hi. But, I have one of my favorite poems, so sometimes I will say oh I want to listen to my favorite poem, in Maya he will tell me, and just recite through the phone, and then into the conversation. Those were a kind of experience of love, in which I miss that and I finished just a novel last year and I sent it to a contest in Merida which I hope gets published. My last chapter is all about my memories although I changed our names, okay because I kept the Whatsapp conversations after he died, and I copied them into a word document. I was writing the novel and I said boom. We all have economically and professionally, we also were at the same level, the only difference we had was age. That’s what I want to believe. We had in many ways our indigenous connection, because then he began to learn about the Caribbean, which he was so into the Yucatec Maya and we all learned that we were cousins through the times. And that the women from Cuba used to come to Yucatan and Isla de Mujeres to give birth. I mean through all that time we were researching, and the deities, and their sexualities, and the vocabulary and all of that... I was... That's why I’m telling you all how my work and my work on sexuality have been informed by indigenous and Afro Caribbean knowledge of sexuality. I began to research and write in my dissertation all about the indigenous research I was doing in the Caribbean and realizing that before the goddamn colonialist Españoles came through, they were all transexual indigenous people free and accepted in our communities. They were written in the Codices, it was not speculation. During that time Isaac and I, we shared, learned a lot things during that time. I started developing these types of drawings. I also started getting interested in Caribbean Indigenous astronomy. I learned through my research, because that was guided by the spirit of my great grandmother. And I tell this story and people don’t believe me, oh we’ve been talking for a long time but one day I hear the spirit of her voice telling me you have to learn astronomy. The indigenous astronomy of the Caribbean because I already had learned in my Mayan, Yucatec Mayan classes about the deities, constellations, and I said oh no I refuse, its going.. I have to learn astronomy… it’s going to be another five years after I have finished. But one night at 2 o'clock in the morning, I felt the spirit of my great grandmother just picking me up and saying you have to go to the library so I dress up because you know the time with the spirit comes you have to follow the spirit. Because something wrong is going to happen if I don't do, so I dress up, I get up and I took the bus because the university bus was running 24 hours a day because the library was open 24 hours. I arrived at the library… I used my card and entered and see the energy taking me all the way to the second basement. All the books were there, and I started opening and I said Oh… when I did the research and finished, I took it to Mignolo and I said look and Mignolo just went like (Starts shaking head in disbelief and opens mouth wide). I said yes my great grandmother working on me really heavy, really really really really heavy. I shared this also with Isaac and then we realize you know that the Indigenous Caribbean and the Yucatec Mayas have the same deities like Huracan.
There are both in the Popol Vuh.

So I start figuring it out and understand that my way of not only going to Duke University and having the opportunity to learn Yucatec Mayan, I have a boyfriend who is an Indigenous Yucatec Mayan, writer and artist. I’m learning about all of these and I go to learn the Indigenous Caribbean stuff and then a sense of peace. I finally figured it out for myself. It was kind of like peace. Peace that made me so strong. The people at the school were really amazed that I finished in five years. In the graduate school they were like: “oh you’re graduating,” I said I am graduating, honey. I'm done with my dissertation. It came, I became and I transcribed all the spirits and the knowledge and I finished. I now I have the job, that's something else, I have been a curator since I was in Iowa and the film in different art practices. When I was studying at Duke because I was interested in African diaspora art I went to study with Richard Powell, who is a leading scholar in African American and Afro Diaspora contemporary art. Richard told me: “Raul, because you went to study at the University of Iowa, you should study Elizabeth Catlett, she’s an African American artist. She lives in Mexico now, but she got an MFA from the University of Iowa.” Okay. So, you realize how the ancestral path begins to be connected in so many ways. I became a scholar of Elizabeth Catlett and wrote about her and then when I'm doing the research, I learned that Elizabeth Catlett did her BA at Howard University. But I never imagined I was going to get this job. Oh, and my professor Richard Powell also went to Howard, so I applied for the job and then I was called I got the interview and I was told: We want to hire you because we want to open, we are so focused on the African American and we want to open the diaspora, and you know what you are doing.” I look back at Iowa, Elizabeth Catlett and all the stuff I learned and I say, “God, you know the spirit of who brought me here, open the road, to come and have this job.” I don't see any other explanation, it doesn’t make sense... I want whatever… People say to me: “Oh Raul, what are you saying, your curriculum, you this, you have done that,” oh and I said yes… But I have applied for other jobs and another museum where Elizabath Catlett didn't go to school, but looked right there and I got it. Somehow her spirit had to do something because we connected through the University of Iowa, and Mexico. Oh, it has opened my conversation with Afro-Mexican artists in the whole country. I’m working now in the Caribbean diaspora which is why I’m so lost in the work that I am doing right now because the first things that I do, I’m going to do the curatorial project, so I look into our collection. I start figuring out that they are Jamaican, Haitians, Cuban artists from the 50s, 40s and 30s in our collection. I was like, “Oh” then I found out about an African American who went to the Caribbean and produced artwork that is in our collection. Now, I’m finding out certain artists that I thought were “African American,” but they are first generation Caribbeans, born from Caribbean immigrants. And now as I am writing my curatorial essay, which doesn't happen with the Latinos, we don’t get assimilated into this because you are Latinx but you’re Cuban American, you’re Chicano, Puerto Rican, we can keep that with us. But in the African American community you have to be black and American, black American. Like Basquiat, do you know Basquiat?

DIANA LIZETTE
Yes

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Basquiat, his father was Haitian and his mother was Puerto Rican. But, everybody says his work is African American. And so how do they erase you? How even African Americans so assimilate the black people from other parts of the world into being African-American. There is an eraser of their ethnicity. This has happened with several artists who are first generation Caribbean immigrants. I’m finding this all out through the research that I’m doing for this exhibition. I'm mesmerized by these findings because nobody has written and talked about this before. I am now thinking how even these old artists, their spirits are calling me to mention that they are Barbadians, Jamaicans, Caribbean. His parents were from there and they were born here but as a result of their migration and incorporated them into their exhibition, because I have the proof and the document. I found out because the University of Iowa being a research institution, my dear, I was really trained to be a goddamn good researcher. Bless the spirit of Maria Martinez Cano who got me there. Cuz I go and I did it, and I found it. That’s where I am right now.

DIANA LIZETTE
It's been such a beautiful and honor to listen and hear you. To also acknowledge el trabajo tan importante que estas haciendo. Y reconocer las guías y los espíritus que te han traído a este momento.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
Gracias a ti. I’m honored. You know sometimes there are things you cannot verbally express but I really honor the kind of sensorial connection you and I have. Has given me the energy to speak to you, but to also know you, and see your work, and your love for this. We now have a community.

DIANA LIZETTE
Si, we do.

RAUL MOARQUECH FERRERA BALANQUET
You can count on me and if it's possible they’re always... You know like I told there were many people, elders who guide me, and if you have the need to ask for guidance, let me know. I’m here. I just want to say that I am here.

DIANA LIZETTE
Gracias Raul. I will.