The Magazine

A Brief Chronicle of an Ancestral Journey

May 25, 2025
By: Ange Cayuman

A decade ago, I began searching for Ancestral Diversity in film and audiovisual media. One of its origins was a visit I made in 2013 to the Museum of Pre-Columbian and Indigenous Art in Montevideo, Uruguay. They were showing the exhibition “Original Pleasures. Sexuality, Identity, and Gender in Indigenous Societies.” Two films about the Muxe, called “the third sex” by the Zapotec community of Juchitán de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, Mexico, caught my attention.

After years of sexual dissident activism, I needed to explore experiences that resonated with my sexual dissident identity and my belonging to the Mapuche people, an Indigenous community in the southern part of what are now Argentina and Chile. A few years later, I settled in Santiago, Chile, and met Seba Calfuqueo, a Mapuche visual artist, and her video performance “You Will Never Be a Weye.” In this work, she interweaves family stories of rejection of homosexuality, passages from colonial chronicles, and a visual aesthetic proposal centered on the artist dressing her body in the traditional fashion of Mapuche women, but in fantasy clothing. Five minutes that open up an understanding of the complexities of identity and colonial violence.

At that moment, I understood the potential of audiovisual language to enable and facilitate conversations about Ancestral Diversity, that is, about being Mapuche and dissident, not as a summation of identities or categories but as an interweaving. The challenge was to uncover interrelationships between collective historical processes, possible ancestral sex-gender genealogies, and contemporary dissident life processes. The following year, Seba invited me to be part of her audiovisual project “Domo.” I hesitated to join this work because “domo” means “woman” in Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, and I was feeling that this nomination no longer represented me, but I accepted. I wanted to be part of that dialogue. At that time, Seba identified as a gay man, and I as a lesbian. Over time, we have supported each other in our identity-forming processes, and today Seba is “she” and I am “he.”

I began an investigation and search for films and audiovisual works about dissidence from different Indigenous peoples. I realized there was a world rich in dissident works from communities that represented themselves, that is, works made by dissident and Indigenous filmmakers and visual artists. This search intensified when, in 2019, I began working on the International Festival of Indigenous Film and Arts in Wallmapu, FicWallmapu, in Temuco, southern Chile. This was a recommendation from Seba Calfuqueo, as the festival team wanted to address this topic. I proposed that we use the concept of Ancestral Diversity, borrowed from the relatives in Mexico who, in 2012, presented it in a Human Rights report before the Organization of American States (OAS) on diverse Indigenous populations, information that was shared with me by producer and filmmaker of the Wayuu people, David Hernández.

One of the actions we carried out was the art residency “Territories in Tension” in the town of Challupen, near Lake Calafquen and the Villarrica Volcano, in southern Chile. We proposed creating works related to this concept, based on a stay on these lands and a dialogue with the Mapuche community that inhabits them. One of the resident artists, Neyen Pailamilla, met the Mapuche poet Gabriela Llanquinao as part of her research, who shared a pewma (dream) she had had with her. This process gave rise to the audiovisual work called “Wüfko,” which means “spring” in Mapudungun. In the Mapuche tradition, pewma are fundamental, and Neyen, assuming the role of pewmatufe (interpreter of dreams), created a piece that, in three minutes and fourteen seconds, interweaves narrative, dream, feminine sexuality, and a performance where her body becomes another element of the land.

During the pandemic, we held online discussions and film screenings about Ancestral Diversity, and I met the filmmakers of these Indigenous films. In 2021, I began traveling to their countries to meet and interview them. I also obtained press accreditation for the Morelia Film Festival, which has an important window for the distribution of Latin American Indigenous cinema. In a café near the movie theaters, I interviewed Celina Manuel, a Purépecha filmmaker who was premiering the short film “La espera” at the festival. The synopsis reads: “Yazmín and Zenaida, daughter-in-law and mother-in-law, live awaiting the arrival of their husbands. A time that will reveal infinite possibilities.” This film, which has been widely circulated at screenings and festivals, addresses the situation of the communities’ migration processes, what happens to those who stay behind, and the flow of sexual and emotional relationships.

At the same time, “Nudo Mixteco,” the multi-award-winning film by Mixteca director Ángeles Cruz, premiered at the same festival. One of the film’s three stories is about a lesbian couple who reunite after one of them leaves town due to the discrimination she suffered as a teenager. In “Nudo,” as Ángeles affectionately calls her film, we find one of the most beautiful sex scenes between Indigenous women I’ve ever seen. I witnessed the wave of applause in the theater when they announced that Cruz won Best Screenplay and that the film won the Audience Award at the festival. Ángeles had traveled to Spain a few days earlier, so I sent her the photos and videos I took of the event. We agreed to meet in her town, in Oaxaca, upon her return.

On November 9, 2021, I arrived at night in Villa Guadalupe Victoria, a town in the upper Mixteca region of Oaxaca, Mexico. When I got out of the car, Ángeles Cruz was waiting for me. I spent a week accompanying her in various duties as community treasurer, a position she held that year, which is highly relevant to mention, as the Mexican filmmaker’s cinema is anchored in her relationship with her people. She has presented her projects at the community assembly of Villa Guadalupe Victoria, filmed in its surroundings, with professional actors and actresses, and members of the community for her characters.

One day after her duties, we were having coffee, and I asked her what tiricia was. Her first short film is called “Tiricia, or How to Cure Sadness.” Without further ado, she said, “Let’s go to the river.” Along the way, we picked white roses and wildflowers of the same color. Noticing some people watching us and whispering, I mentioned it to her. “They’re always talking about me,” she replied. When we arrived, she showed me how to cleanse. I rolled up my pants, took off my shoes, and entered the water. I greeted the river like I do in my village, lifting four handfuls of water and whispering: “Mari mari ngen ko, chalieyu lewfü. I greet you, spirit of the river.” Then I cried until there was no more river in my eyes. When I finished, I let go of the flowers and didn’t look back. The sadness was gone.

To calm me from that profound moment of unraveling my pain and insecurities resulting from various instances of homophobic violence, Ángeles took me to the shore of a large lagoon. On the way, we passed a small blue house. “We were going to film ‘The Letter’ here, but we thought it was too fairy-tale-like,” she told me. “The Letter” is Cruz’s second short film and the first Indigenous lesbian film written and directed by an Indigenous lesbian woman in Abya Yala, the words the Gunadule people use to refer to what we know as the Americas.

I continued traveling and in 2022, I landed in Bogotá. My colleagues from the production company Sentarte, Arte con Sentido, had invited me to participate in the Daupará, the Colombian Indigenous Film and Video Festival. They initiated meetings with diverse women from Indigenous communities and invited me to give an online talk on the topic in 2021. For this edition of Daupará, they asked me to give an in-person talk on film and Ancestral Diversity. I prepared the exhibition “Tüfachi purun inchiñ ngealu / This dance is for us,” inspired by a verse by the poet Daniela Catrileo. Initially composed of six works by Mapuche artists representing sexual dissidence, over time, it has incorporated works from other communities.

For the past five years, I’ve traveled throughout Mexico, Colombia, and Chile, connecting with filmmakers and visual artists from the Gunadule, Wayuu, Arhuaco, Purépecha, Maya, Mapuche, Mixteco, and Embera Chamí communities, who make films and videos about Ancestral Diversity. Through the interviews and conversations we’ve had, I’ve seen a commitment to self-representation on these issues and a willingness to foster dialogue within their own communities. An example of this is Ysai Muñoz Bueno’s documentary “Sexilio,” in which the protagonist explains to her community in an assembly: “I dress as a woman; I am who I am. I feel proud of who I am. I want to be recognized for being an Indigenous trans person.”

More than ten years after the first audiovisual works of self-representation of Ancestral Diversities, I celebrate the renewed circulation of these imaginaries, which are part of the struggles that Indigenous peoples wage in the current colonial and extractive context. As part of our communities, we reverse the processes of dispossession by generating our own art forms. There are festivals and film exhibitions like Daupará, which has been addressing this theme for three years, and also exhibition windows like the one presented by the Alborde Transfeminist Women’s Festival, with its Rooted Identities category.

I also observe a convergence between the cinema of Indigenous peoples of Abya Yala and cinemas from other latitudes, such as Hawaii, where important films on Ancestral Diversities have been produced through the search for their historical narratives and which have been very well received in the exhibitions where I have mediated the artistic and cultural aspects of the films. Other collective processes related to the production and circulation of this cinema are the creation of spaces for women and dissidents, such as the Weavers of the Image Collective. In 2023, as a result of several meetings, this network of young people from Colombia was formed to promote cinema and communication based on Ancestral Diversities.

Now and then, I discover new and old Indigenous dissident works in video poetry, music videos, documentaries, fiction, and visual arts. I feel part of a collective force that expands the political, cultural, and artistic diversity of Indigenous peoples through the audiovisual arts. This journey has been a healing process for me and has given me the experience of being part of a community being cultivated across hundreds of miles.

This year, I began a mediation project for educational events on Ancestral Diversity cinema with colleagues from the Weavers of Image Collective. Through the creation of guides, we seek to foster gatherings and conversations characteristic of community worlds and to fill our territories with images, sounds, and dissident movement.

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About the Author

Ange Cayuman is a Mapuche trans writer, journalist, and audiovisual creator. He works in film programming, mediation, and audiovisual curatorships across Argentina, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. His research focuses on the diaspora of Indigenous peoples, Indigenous audiovisual archives, poetry by Indigenous women, and the self-representations of ancestral diversities.