the bumpin’ bici

“Raramujer and the bumpin’ bici”

These performance pieces are recent public manifestations and interventions about aetheticizing protest and moving between intimate and private spaces and also public spectacles. Both are recent projects where I cross communities and public space and share my beliefs and experiences, planting seeds for possible dialogue and transformation of self and community. This work is focused on consciousness-raising in new audiences and getting off the stage and outside the gallery and into the streets.

“The bumpin bici” is a performance intervention with a movement music mobile and a battery powered sound system on a bike basket that allows me to ride and rhyme sharing my worldview and experiences through a mobile platform, thereby creating spaces for interaction and exchange in the public domain. My character “Raramujer” is a urban indigenous women who shares oral history and urban indigenous worldviews across Los Angeles. She is a Xicana Super Hero of sorts who rides a bike through Los Angeles streets using her voice as a tool for education, empowerment, and transformation as well as other ceremonial happenings.

With “Raramujer” I am a performance protestor both part of and marching or riding against oppression. I am a messenger of politics and peace by re-appropriating public space in marches and community corners and streets where I ride a bike, play music, and share some of my own Xicana feminist political, spiritual and cultural poetry and floetry/hip hop. I ride along festivals and marches and sidewalks and street corners becoming both part of the events and urban setting as a performance and also making my life as a Xicana protestor and performing artist my art. I share much of my indigenous traditions and songs thereby creating public ritual and performance prayers in the streets.