Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño’s Aesthetic Curanderismo
Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño, Lo que grita mi piel, 2020, on view at UVA in 2023. Image courtesy of Morgan Ashcom.
“An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious.”
—Gloria Anzaldúa¹
Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño’s Lo que me grita mi piel sculpture is an autoethnographical and autobiographical soul retrieval. In a soul retrieval ceremony, a curandera transcends into a heightened consciousness and enters the spirit realm, seeking lost soul fragments. Sahagún Nuño, a curandero, envisions this sculptural portrait as both an artwork and recuperación del alma, a decolonial spiritual roadmap for healing from colonial, immigrant, and undocumented trauma and pain, all the while traversing the porous boundaries between fine art and craft in contemporary aesthetic theory.
Following in the creative footsteps of Gloria Anzaldúa, Sahagún Nuño inhabits the Coyolxauhqui imperative, a struggle to reconstruct oneself and heal the sustos resulting from trauma, racism, and other kinds of violations que hacen pedazos de nuestras almas, scatter our energy and hunt us.² The same spiritual anguish that motivated Anzaldúa to write pushes Sahagún to create. Sahagún, like Anzaldúa, simultaneously looks at the self as subject and object as he scrutinizes his wounds, touches his scars, maps the nature of his conflicts, and speaks directly with spirit.
“By transcending linear temporalities and geographical boundaries, Sahagún travels to the spirit realm, where he searches for pieces of his past to liberate his soul in the present, thus granting himself numerous probabilities for the future.”
As Sahagún Nuño tells me, one can find missing soul pieces in the middle world via dreams, mountain caves, tree trunks, or memoryscapes. By transcending linear temporalities and geographical boundaries, Sahagún travels to the spirit realm, where he searches for pieces of his past to liberate his soul in the present, thus granting himself numerous probabilities for the future.
Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño, Lo que grita mi piel, 2020. Image courtesy of Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño
An earlier work of the same title illustrates two versions of Sahagún Nuño: a charcoal depiction below and an abstract caulk rendering above. Caulk is a flexible material that can seal air cracks and gaps as a means to repair; even in this early stage, the materiality of the piece alludes to its soul retrieval nature.
Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño, Lo que grita mi piel, 2020, on view at UVA in 2023. Image courtesy of Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño.
Read autobiographically, both artworks characterize different iterations of Sahagún Nuño’s body transcending beyond the mortal world. In the two pieces, Sahagún Nuño’s body appears to float in the air as though something pulls him from above, but he doesn’t fight it; he surrenders to a higher consciousness.
The colossal, three-dimensional sculptural work is a wonderous cacophony of materiality, including wood, gorilla glue, beads, charcoal, silicone, pin nails, metal, foam, and found objects such as artisanal sculptures of Our Lady of Guadalupe, Santo Toribio, and San Martin de Porres as well as jute fibers and even a colonial ship, which together measure 108 x 84 x 72 in. A single point anchors Sahagún Nuño’s floating body to the floor. The sculpture’s left foot barely graces the ground. But the right foot, culminating in a colonial British war vessel, kicks the entire body weight backward.
Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño, Lo que grita mi piel, 2020, on view at UVA in 2023. Image courtesy of Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño.
Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño, Lo que grita mi piel, 2020, on view at UVA in 2023. Image courtesy of Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño.
Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño, Lo que grita mi piel, 2020, on view at UVA in 2023. Image courtesy of Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño.
With arms wide open, the torso and the joining extremities are a collection of countless tiny pieces of wood with nails piercing through. Juxtaposing the roughness is the foam fingers. The chest cavity bursts with beadwork. The head does, too, with wooden beads and pearls simultaneously concealing and joining together the three upside-down figures of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as well as Santo Toribio and San Martin de Porres. Whereas Our Lady of Guadalupe is responsible for the creation of the first Catholic Church in Mexico and serves as the religion’s patroness mother to all Mexicans, San Martin de Porres is the patron saint of mixed races. Santo Toribio, a Catholic priest that Mexican soldiers killed during the Cristero War, is the patron saint of undocumented Mexican immigrants and border crossings.
By including these figures, Sahagún Nuño simultaneously signals his religious upbringing and turns to the holy protection of the saints whose sole purpose is to aid mixed-race Mexican immigrants. The inclusion of a triad of Our Lady of Guadalupe figures visually marks the patriarchal, colonial underpinnings of Catholicism, as well as signals the Indigenous nature of curanderismo, as some believe Our Lady of Guadalupe not to be a single saint but instead a composite of various native deities.
Sahagún Nuño’s work draws from “mercado aesthetics,” a term he coined to describe the ease he feels in his body and soul within the safe brown space of a mercado. As Professor Joshua Guzman says, “The sobering intensity of the disenfranchisement of minoritarian people in the United States is nothing less than browning the way we understand the misapplication and abuses of those suspended realities known as justice, democracy, and freedom.” Brown is, therefore, not an identity or an object of knowledge like Latine and Chicane. Instead, it can act as a racial signifier capacious enough to create solidarities between Latinxs, Indigenous people in the United States, and even transnationally reach the global south.³
“In a mercado, one can heal their spirit, enjoy a home-cooked meal, and find bottled-up remedios de abuelitas to cure everything from a blister to mal de ojo. ”
A mercado is not just a marketplace; it’s a center of information where elders pass down knowledge to the next generations of pious consumers who, under a single roof, can access everything necessary to thrive. In a mercado, one can heal their spirit, enjoy a home-cooked meal, and find bottled-up remedios de abuelitas to cure everything from a blister to mal de ojo.
Earlier this year, Sahagún Nuño visited Los Angeles, coinciding with the Queerteñx: Trans Fronterizes/Cuir Transnationalism exhibition opening I curated at Loyola Marymount University’s Laband Gallery. The day after the opening, Sahagún Nuño and I sought to acquire religious statues to feature in one of his upcoming projects; together, we visited El Mercado de Los Angeles. As we secured the objects Sahagún Nuño desired, a señor shared his wisdom about santos and their specialties and demonstrated how to speak to each saint to gain their favor.
We also visited a botanica where a señora cared for our body and soul by teaching us spiritual remedies and ointments for our physical ailments. Sahagún Nuño and I became hungry during our visit as we rejoiced in spending hours learning from our viejitos, and a friend recommended we get a gordita at La Cocina.
Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño, Lo que grita mi piel, 2020, on view at UVA in 2023. Image courtesy of Luis Álvaro Sahagún Nuño.
At every step of our day in the mercado, an extended community of brown people surrounded us; they physically, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally, and intellectually cared for both of us. Mercado aesthetics transcend the visual markers of the puestos and connote layers of care provided by and for brown communities. Lo que grita mi piel simultaneously acts as a soul retrieval while alluding to mercado aesthetics and the safety and joy of brown spaces. Lo que grita mi piel contains multiple layers of meaning, which only spiritually attuned individuals can access.
Sahagún Nuño’s creative axes are his portrait limpias, during which he reaches the spirit realm on behalf of the sitter; he then renders the limpia into a portrait to hold the sitters’ spiritual ailments.⁴ In doing so, Sahagún Nuño guides them toward spiritual decolonization and healing. Lo que grita mi piel is Sahagún Nuño’s autobiographical limpia; he reached the middle world (what Anzaldúa called the Coyolxauhqui imperative) to perform a soul retrieval on himself. Inhabiting the Coyolxauhqui imperative—using both Anzaldúan theory and curandero elders’ knowledge to ground him—allowed him to spiritually map how to move forward after a lifetime of colonial trauma.
Sahagún Nuño, a member of the undoc+ (formerly or currently undocumented) community, arrived in the United States as a 4-year-old. His family has a long history of migration to the U.S. His grandfathers were both braceros, and his parents crossed the border through the desert, which culminated in jobs in Chicago’s steel industry. Sahagún Nuño’s last memory of home was waving goodbye to his neighbors after closing the door to his childhood house for the last time while walking alongside a tianguis. Sahagún Nuño took the first steps in his immigrant journey in a Mexican mercado. Lo que grita mi piel thus recalls the safety of home and the uncertainty of migration while questioning belonging and pointing toward undocumented narratives. It challenges spiritual coloniality and alludes to a mestizaje often in tension with colonial demands.
¹ Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Book Company, 1987, 69.
² Anzaldúa, Gloria. Light In the Dark/Luz en lo oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, and Reality, ed. Analouise Keating, Durham: Duke University Press, 2015.
³ No linguistic qualifier is available today to encompass the complexity of any single group of people. In my read of brownness, it makes space for people of different races and ethnicities to join in imperfect solidarities—as guided by the epistemology that Aruna D’Souza set forth.
⁴ During the portrait limpias, Sahagún Nuño speaks to sitters on multiple occasions and gets to know them holistically. This is such an involved, intricate practice that for years, he only portrayed his closest family members. Recently, he expanded this practice to include close friends and acquaintances to heal his community.
Erika Hirugami, MA. MAAB. MPHil.
First-generation transnational Japanese Mexican immigrant, formerly undocumented.
Hirugami holds an MAAB from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art and an MA and MPhil from UCLA, where she is currently a doctoral candidate and epistemologically braids the aesthetics of undocumentedness to challenge immigration policy and politics.
Hirugami is the founder and CEO of CuratorLove, Co-founder of the UNDOC+Collective, a Professor at SMC and LAMC, has been an Arts for LA, NALAC, and DAICOR Fellow, and a CCI Catalyst. She has developed curatorial statements at museums and galleries across the globe, and her written work has been published internationally.