Enabling Difficult Conversations: Quemar Las patas del Imperio
November 12, 2025 | 5:30–7:30 PM | Contemplative Sciences Center
The Enabling Difficult Conversations series is intended to bring artists, scholars, and the public into conversation around urgent and often challenging issues. Hosted by the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences, the series creates open, inclusive spaces where diverse perspectives can be heard, examined, and respected.
Quemar las patas del Imperio: Migratory Immortality
An atemporal perspective of Federico Cuatlacuatl Video & Experimental Film(s)
Curated by Erika Hirugami, MA. MAAB. MPhil.
According to Mark Rifkin, settler colonialism imposes a linearity of time that is universal to dispossess indigenous peoples of the complexity of atemporal sovereignty. By braiding together Cuatlacuatl’s Videos and Experimental Film Documentaries beyond chronological creation, a sui-generis reading of time is proposed; one that can simultaneously exist intergenerationally, beyond borders, and dignify the resilience of Nahua knowledge across time and space simultaneously.
This event marks the premiere of Quemar las patas del Imperio, Cuatlacuatl’s latest Video project commissioned by the University of Virginia to coincide with the inaugural exhibition of UVA’s Global Spanish Initiative entitled Fuego Eterno: Soberanías Visuales, guided by Jolene Rickard’s hypothesis of visual sovereignty as a site of resistance, awareness, and empowerment anchored in the aesthetic.
Post-screening Q&A with
Federico Cuatlacuatl, MFA, Erika Hirugami, MA. MAAB. MPhil, and Kody Grant (UVA Tribal Liaison)
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About the Video & Experimental Documentary Films
Tewame Tiyolicha Kawitl, 2023
Of the series Tiemperos del Antropoceno
Single Channel Video Art | 11min | Trailer
Through Tewame Tiyolicha Kawitl, a voice speaking Nahuatl guides a reflection on the effects and legacy of colonialism, the resistance and resilience of Indigenous peoples, and the difficulties of living with imposed borders: borders of identity, state, and linear. The work emphasizes the strength and survival of Nahua communities, despite forced displacement, identity erasure, and border-making. It frames traditions, memory, and being as forms of resistance while commemorating the lives lost in forced self-displacements.
This work connects Cuatlacuatl’s immigrant narrative (Indigenous Nahua undoc+) with the larger historical, colonial, environmental, and temporal structures while offering an alternative way to perceive time and identity — not as linear forward progress but as cyclical, layered, coexisting —resonating with Nahua cosmology.
Coapan en Espera | Coapan on standby, 2019
Single Channel Experimental Documentary Video | 15:16min | Trailer
Coapan En Espera highlights the migratory history of the diasporic community originally from Cholula, Puebla, Mexico—Cuatlacuatl’s own hometown. The community of San Francisco Coapan began migrating north in the late 1980s; now, four decades later, the hope of returning home has almost vanished—a community on standby, where over half of the population currently lives in the United States.
This experimental documentary focuses on the emotional, cultural, and social implications of this migration. It captures a community that is in a state of "espera" (waiting/standby) — a tension between the hope of returning home and the possibility that return may never happen. The documentary highlights what life is like for those left behind, those living in diaspora, and those who are caught in between.
Tolchikaualistli
Of the series Tiemperos del Antropoceno
Single Channel Video | 9:13min | Trailer
Tolchikaulistli centers existing simultaneously in two separate dimensions of time as a reverberation of the colonial rupture that seeks to erase indigenous culture anchored by displacement. The work proposes that a rebellious spirit can meet this displacement and smuggle cultural resistance and self-determination across time and space beyond an affixed identity narrative. Thus, transcending loss, rupture, and dispossession to rethink migration and linear time to carry forth a new relation to memory, one that is centered on healing that echoes a plurality of belonging potentialities, beyond geography and nation.
A liminal and fragmented soundscape is paired with aesthetic futurity imagery anchored in the Carnaval de Huejotzingo, where ethereal sound glides alongside a Nahuatl-speaking voice that follows a pair of figures through the mountainside of Coapan Cholula, Puebla, México.
Quemarle las patas del Imperio, 2025
Single Channel Video | 10min
Quemar las patas del Imperio centers fire as the ancestral, spiritual, and regenerative force that continues to burn deep inside every individual with ancestral ties that predate colonialism. The figures echo past-future Nahuales and the embodiment of Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent, who lights a fire in the harm that invades one’s heart to purify the spirit. A fire cleansing becomes the antidote proposed by the film to disappear colonial deities and thus return to the matriarchal fire that never died, that which provides protective life to the memory of our futures.
Burning the feet of (quemar las patas de) is in implicit reference to Cuauhtémoc, the last Mexica Tlatoani (leader), whose feet were burned by Hernán Cortés as a torture mechanism to relinquish the Mexica empire’s wealth, thought by the Spaniards to be gold instead of corn. This video piece incites a series of questions, from how to burn the feet of an empire, to how to deport white supremacy.
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This program is part of Global Week at UVA, a celebration of international perspectives and cross-cultural dialogue across Grounds. Quemar las patas del Imperio will also be featured at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts as part of the Pocahontas Reframed Film Festival on November 22, 2025, further extending its reach beyond Grounds.