Things That Live With Us/ Cosas Que Viven Con Uno

Manuel Moreno, my father, was a political prisoner in Cuba from 1979 to 1982, during a period of increased Soviet presence on the island. He went to prison because he used his voice, which happened to be one of dissent against Fidel Castro’s regime. A few years later, in 1989, he moved to Hialeah, a Cuban enclave in Miami; but the loss of his Cuba continued to impose itself on his everyday life, manifesting itself in physical and psychic pains that he expressed through almost every utterance. In this text, Things that live with us/Cosas que viven con uno , I use personal narratives and draw upon theoretical discourses, to understand what parts of my identity have, in the words of Gloria Anzaldúa, been “inherited, acquired, imposed.” By attempting to

understand the impact my father had on my identity and performance art practice, I retrace our histories, seeking answers as to why I have a deep kinship/twinship with him. Through Sara Ahmed’s writing on pain, Anzaldúa’s theories on mestizaje, and the study of epigenetics, my aim is to further question what we, as the children of immigrants, do with the stories passed down to us. For these individual stories make up the stories of a people.