Martita Abril’s “Tacos de Lengua” performance had been going for a while when the party started. At the Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens, where the work debuted on Friday, a door opened and audience members were invited to cross from the performance space into the adjoining storage warehouse, where the Mexican band Directos de la Sierra was already brightening the space with music. Abril served mezcal in ceramic cups with a garnish of chapulines, or roasted grasshoppers. Her aunt Raquel Quiñonez was dishing out tacos, packed with chopped tongue.
But “Tacos de Lengua” had begun in a darker place. Abril had entered the theater hunched over, pushing a rolling cart with four red balloons attached. Doggedly, she made her way onto the stage, which had been decorated with a shrine of candles and branches. Climbing onto the cart, she retrieved a cleaver from inside it and, with a sudden slashing motion, popped one of the balloons.
Red confetti rained down, but the mood wasn’t festive. The soundscape was faint recordings of the streets of Tijuana; Abril grew up regularly crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. Her actions in this opening section were highly spare and repetitive, and it took her a long time to pop all four balloons. Mostly, she kept pushing the cart — joined at her back by her mother, Martha Quiñonez, then also by her aunt. The line of women, bent over, sometimes swapping places as they pushed onward, embodied quiet struggle across generations.
“Tacos de Lengua” expressed border life from multiple angles. It was Martha, playing the accordion and singing, who ushered the audience into the party room. There, along with the drinks and dancing, were shadows of the other space. Amid stacks of theatrical equipment, you could spy slices of watermelon but also a cardboard sign reading “Rompe ICE,” a political pun combining the Spanish word for “icebreaker” with the acronym for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Periodically, Abril disappeared behind one of the walls of stuff and swung a hatchet into a log, her form ominously silhouetted.
Then she yelled “Qué siga la fiesta” (“Keep the party going”) and Directos de la Sierra struck up the folk song “Cielito Lindo” or a tune by the band Los Tigres del Norte. After a while, Abril pushed her cart back across the border into the theater, taking some of the party with her in the form of mini disco lights. To Corona’s 1990s club classic “The Rhythm of the Night,” she rolled her head in circles and kicked a leg backward again and again.
“Qué siga la fiesta,” she shouted once more, and the party continued. The rhythm of the night was the back-and-forth between austere performance art and a loose family gathering for an audience of mostly fellow artists. If the performance side was a little skimpy, Abril was a generous hostess — sharing the pleasures of her culture with some bitterness and threat.
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