The Brooklyn Rail

11 a.m.: We warm up to the beat of Argentine folk drums, the bombo legüero and caja coplera. It is hours until the march officially begins, but we are rancheando, or hanging out, exchanging compliments on our DIY costumes. The all-black looks evoke grunge, rock and roll, and steampunk. During the first rehearsal, we created a collective lattice from cloth, fishnet, wire, and backpack straps, each person adding something by knot or stitch. The following week, we dismantled it and incorporated pieces into each of our outfits. Pinned to our bodies are scraps of fabric we’ve stenciled with messages such as “Memory, Truth, and Justice” and “30,400,” the estimated number of people who were disappeared during Argentina’s last military dictatorship.

Today is March 24, the anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état that began the junta’s disastrous seven-year rule. Each year on this date, Argentines flood the streets to commemorate the victims of that era’s state violence and to say “never again” (“nunca más”). They carry banners, flags, and posters emblazoned with irreverent slogans, and even a few massive puppets satirizing the current government’s blue-uniformed police. Since 2013, Colectivo FindeUNmundO, or the “End of A World Collective,” an artist-activist group that aims to “knock down the walls between art and politics,” stages a performance at the march. This year, 216 volunteers, including myself, are performing a piece entitled “Collective Heartbeat,” accompanied by thirty-odd traditional folk drummers.

Colectivo FindeUNMundO (FUNO) functions on a participatory model, inviting volunteers to perform in actions throughout the year. The group has performed at the annual 24th of March protest, or 24M, for more than a decade. Like several others in the group, I was inspired to join after witnessing the group in action at last year’s march. My mother had lived through the dictatorship, but rarely talked about it. I recently moved from New York to Buenos Aires to pursue a writing project about the country’s rich tradition of artistic activist interventions. FUNO is part of this lineage, reinvigorated in the post-dictatorship era by legendary groups like the Grupo de Arte Callejero [Group of Street Artists] (GAC) and Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio [Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice Against Forgetfulness and Silence] (H.I.J.O.S.).

Sebastián Martí, one of the original members of FUNO, defined its initial guiding principles as poetry and irony. Its first action, inspired by the work of Argentine fantasy writer Liliana Bodoc, took place in 2012, when many predicted the world would end. The year marked the end of a cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar. The exact date of the action, October 12, also marked ten Mayan centuries since the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas. The group christened itself the “End of A World Collective,” calling for an end of the colonial era brought on by Columbus’s arrival, and celebrating the speculative beginning of a more just, equal future.

This March, our rehearsals took place on Sunday mornings in a large lot under the highway where we could practice walking, stopping, and dancing in unison. Teenagers, grandmothers, single mothers, groups of friends, we gathered in small circles to warm up with games of samurai and orchestra conductor. The vibe was one of jubilant inclusivity, almost cult-like, punctuated only by reminders by the organizers about the need to stay safe on the day of the protest. Lurking in the background was the knowledge that this year, we would face an increased threat to our physical safety because President Javier Milei had been ratcheting up his repression of civil society. Less than two weeks before, at the order of the Ministry of Security, the police had cracked down on the weekly pensioner protest in the capital. More than a hundred people were arrested and over a dozen were injured.

And then, just hours before the march, Milei’s office released a nineteen-minute video in which conservative thinker Agustín Laje refuted the long-established estimate that more than thirty thousand people had been disappeared by the junta. Laje pointedly attempted to shift focus to the violence of left-wing “terrorists” active before the coup. When democracy was restored in Argentina in the eighties, the country unified around a shared understanding that the dictatorship's leaders had perpetrated systemic human rights abuses against their own people and that this should never happen again. Milei, friend of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, is the first Argentine president in four decades of democracy to deviate with such determination from this consensus. In this political climate, just showing up is an act of resistance. The steady heartbeat of the drums feels like protection, like we are learning how to hold our ground.

1:30 p.m.: We begin walking down Avenida de Mayo toward Avenida 9 de Julio. The day is overcast, threatening to rain. Then the sun comes out and it is hot, humid, like being in a greenhouse. At the intersection with 9 de Julio, the two huge avenues create a kind of plaza. Traffic has been stopped and we spread out in the massive rectangular space. A miles-long red cord held by our friends and family separates us from the crowd and creates a stage.

The performance begins with a heartbeat. Each of us places a hand on her heart and thumps in time with the bombo legüero drum. Thump, thump-thump. Thump, thump-thump. Slow, quick-quick. We’re a group of over two hundred walking in every direction. We cross in front of each other and lock eyes; the eye contact is the motor that powers us along. In rehearsal, the instruction had been explicit: “Find someone’s gaze and allow that to move you forward; you cannot advance alone.” What does it mean to walk as a two-hundred-person body? We are many different people of many different ages, heights, genders. How do we avoid running into each other? We tune into the collective heartbeat, played out by the drum, and we maintain each other’s gaze. Sometimes our eyes smile or our mouths or both. Each little moment of connection does power me, I can feel it. These little moments of friction spark energy.

Other protestors peer at us curiously. They stay to watch, filming the performance on their phones. Each of us has a scarf in one of eleven bright colors stashed in a pocket or satchel. With these scarves, we form different flags: first the indigenous Wiphala flag, then the Progress Pride flag, 216 people strong. Drones capture us from above. We sway and wave each of our scarves, making the whole flag dance. Then we move aside and the women with the white scarves become the protagonists. When they tie the scarves over their heads, they become the spitting images of the young Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who bravely took to the plaza each week during the dictatorship to demand the whereabouts of their disappeared children. Linked at the arms, they march fiercely toward the front of the perimeter. The crowd hoots and hollers.

We perform one, two, three times, in the sun, until we are hot and hungry and tired. It is unclear if we’ll be able to move forward. The Plaza de Mayo is already full. There are too many people. Hundreds of thousands. A butterfly lands on someone’s scarf. We sit on the asphalt and wait for the crowd to budge. A group of retirees begins a chant directed to the police, “How sad, how sad, how sad it must be to hit a retiree in order to eat.” People cheer when a cart goes by stacked high with framed photos of Norita Cortiñas, one of the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo who died last May.

3:30 p.m.: Finally we’re moving again, slowly crawling toward the Plaza de Mayo. How do you capture what it’s like to be walking with a group of over two hundred people clapping in sync? The sound echoes in your breastbone. The chanting, the full-body expression. The insistence on taking up public space. It chokes me up. It makes me want to move and shout. The street narrows and the crowd presses in on us. The perimeter of our red ribbon shrinks and we're forced to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. A truck with representatives of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo passes by. A loud chant starts up: “Mothers of the Plaza, the people embrace you!” There are chants of “ole, ola,” calling for litigation of the military leaders who got off scott-free due to impunity laws passed by in the late eighties.

Now we perform while walking. The performances shorten and lengthen and we can’t hear the drums because there is a tremendous racket on all sides. Behind us, another, more powerful set of drummers play a different rhythm. Without our drums to cue us, the only way to continue the performance is to copy those in front of us. We trained for this in rehearsals, all those exercises about how to move as one body, how to listen as one. If one person stops, everyone stops. If one person goes, everyone goes. The performance becomes modular: we start in the middle and go to the end.

It begins to drizzle. Smoke from barbeque grills fills the air. The street narrows and the red cord that holds our space tightens to fit, squeezing us together like sausages. At some point, everyone is too tired to sustain eye contact. Ya esta. People mutter about wanting to buy a chori. We are hungry, thirsty, needing to pee.

But then, somehow, the exhaustion reaches its crest and we hit our stride. By the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh performance, we know exactly what to do. The simplicity of repeating the sequence facilitates some other type of presence, as though we’re elated by sheer effort. Against all odds, we’re moving successfully as one body, adaptable, incredibly resilient. In rehearsal, Caro Fernández, one of FUNO’s founding members, spoke about this collective movement as a manner of “constructing antifascism”: learning how to be in the street as one political body at a time when we’re so divided. Learning how to be two hundred hearts beating together.

There is something transcendent about repeating the movements together en boucle. Perhaps we became vessels for some other moment in time and space. The multi-colored silk scarves allow us to shape-shift, forming different flags, or embodying historical figures like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. The sound of the drums gets under my skin. Hours later, at home, falling asleep, I can still hear it.

5 p.m.: In the waiting between performances, we hardly talk to one another, just walk side by side and share water and a few words of encouragement. Assorted flotilla pass us by: a truck with a plaster Milei holding a money bag labeled “$LIBRA” for the cryptocurrency, a wagon blasting archival audio of a Juan Perón speech, a band of Andean pan flute players on foot. As we pass the Israeli Embassy, we wave the colors of the Palestinian flag. Another genocide.

6 p.m.: Adrenaline kicks in as we near the entrance to the Plaza. Our last two performances are electric and the crowd roars. The climax each time is the B-side, a coda that evokes the cacerolazo, or informal pot-banging protest. We bang tuna tins together (ring-ting-ting-ting) while a small group of gymnasts lift each other high holding stencils reading “Disobedience” and “A Burning Desire for Change.” Below them, scrappy graffitists tag the ground with stencils and mime throwing rocks at the police. Caro Fernández said that this was her favorite part of the performance because it “narrates the present moment,” and functions as a “call to action.” In the past few weeks, people have taken to the street with pots and pans to protest the recent police brutality against elderly pensioners.

The gymnasts and graffitists sprint from one end of our “stage” to another, and the rest of us follow, culminating in a huge group hug. We turn the hug out to the crowd and wave hands and applaud them. Repeating these movements over and over in each performance gives them weight; the applause feels genuine, and so does the embrace.

6:20 p.m.: At the last minute, as we step into the Plaza de Mayo, the red cord that has been our constant perimeter snaps in half. We finish our last performance and this time we sing “Fuego” by Bomba Estéreo a cappella, inciting the audience to “keep the fire lit” at the top of our lungs. Our chaotic group, no longer contained by the red cord, careens onto a side street where we stop for sweaty hugs and spontaneous, exhausted dancing. Family and friends who held the perimeter for us join in and we thank each other in rounds, again and again.