Violeta Luna: Performing Mexicana Indigenous Identities

This chapter examines Violeta Luna's Requiem for a Lost Land and NK603: Action for Performer & e-Maíz as transcultural performance works that resist the erasure of Indigenous epistemologies and confront the linked violences of colonialism, global capitalism, and environmental destruction. Drawing on Walter Mignolo's critique of the colonial matrix of power, the analysis frames Luna's use of the body as both archive and altar, enacting what Achille Mbembe terms necropolitics in relation to the U.S.-Mexico drug war, land dispossession, and ecological collapse. Requiem for a Lost Land stages embodied mourning for displaced communities and degraded landscapes, while NK603 critiques genetically modified agriculture and its role in undermining biodiversity, cultural sovereignty, and the livelihoods of rural Mexican communities. Luna's work refuses sanitized multiculturalism, insisting on an active, politicized indigeneity that challenges folkloric stereotypes and the depoliticization of Indigenous cultures. Linking environmental violence to forced migration and climate refugeehood, her performances articulate a transcultural ecology of protest rooted in local histories yet confronting global systems. Through ritual, vulnerability, and symbolic action, Luna transforms the performance space into a site of insurgent memory and ecological resistance, collapsing the false divide between human rights and environmental rights.