Alebrije • noun • (ah-leh-bree-hey)
Definition: brightly colored Mexican folk art sculptures of fantastical creatures
Origin: Mexican Spanish
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My book THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME was released last week on October 12, 2021!
The book has received glowing reviews and Publishers Weekly says that THE CRIME WITHOUT A NAME is one of the top books of Fall 2021.
You can order the book—including the audiobook—and watch recordings of my book tour discussions at Eaton and the New York Public Library at thecrimewithoutaname.com.
This Friday, The Sustainable Culture Lab opened our second annual Altars Festival, and this was a pretty significant moment in the development of our philosophical work.
Last year, we had our first Altars Festival, but due to COVID-19 the entire event needed to be done virtually. Thankfully, this year’s event can be in-person, and we have been fortunate enough to have found a partner in STABLE arts to physically host the event.
The Altars Festival is one attempt by The Sustainable Culture Lab to cultivate ethnogenesis / cultural naissance. Due to living in an ethnocidal society that emphasizes the destruction of culture while keeping the people, American society struggles to conceive of and create sustainable, constructive culture. To combat ethnocide, we cannot merely raise awareness of ethnocide, but must also create sustainable, constructive culture. This is why we are called The Sustainable Culture Lab, and the Altars Festival was developed in our laboratory.
Ethnocide thrives off of systemic division, terror, and the erasure of history and culture, so to counter ethnocide we must cultivate practices that proactively bring people together, provide them with the opportunity to cope with the trauma of ethnocidal oppression, and celebrate and remember their history and culture. The Altars Festival provides people with this opportunity.
During the festival, we bring together artists and commission them to create altars in celebration of their ancestors and culture. This festival is inspired by Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) and the many other ancestor remembrance traditions from around the world. Due to the diversity of America, the altars that the artists create do not look similar, but they still resemble altars. By housing this expression of diversity in one location, we cultivate a new shared culture, and by creating an annual celebration we can help ensure that this practice remains sustainable and constructive for years to come. The hope is that the artists’ work will inspire others to create their own altars, and cultivate a new cultural tradition.
This week’s word “alebrije” (pronounced “ah-leh-bree-hey”) derives from the traditions of Día de los Muertos, and speaks to the culture we can create together.
Alebrije and Spirit Animals
Alebrijes are fantastical, colorful, playful animals that can consist of a variety of different imaginary creatures, and the concept has only existed since 1936. According to legend, Mexican cartonero (a papier-mâché artist) Pedro Linares fell ill, and during one of his fever dreams he envisioned “a donkey with butterfly wings, a rooster with bull horns, and a lion with an eagle head,” and these fantastical beasts kept repeating one word over and over again: “Alebrijes! Alebrijes! Alebrijes! Alebrijes!”
When Linares awoke and returned to health, he began making his alebrijes out of papier-mâché. Soon thereafter Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, who were already customers of his, saw his new creation and the popularity of alebrijes began to spread around Mexico.
Since Frida and Diego were pillars of Mexican culture who proudly celebrated Día de los Muertos, alebrijes started to become interwoven into the celebration. Alebrijes had become more than merely the expression of an artists’ fever dream, and now they had come to symbolize spiritual, mythical animal guides that can help guide us in this life and in the afterlife.
Today, alebrijes can be found on many Día de los Muertos altars and parades, especially the large Día de los Muertos parade in Mexico City. Alebrijes were also featured as two of the main characters in the 2017 Pixar film Coco that introduced many Americans to the tradition.
The cultivation and evolution of alebrijes within Mexican and now also American culture represent a stark contrast to America’s application of the term “spirit animal”.
Earlier this year, I was part of a diverse panel of speakers, and at some point during our discussion someone described some entity as a person’s “spirit animal” and all of the other panelists except one agreed with this assessment and did not initially find it problematic.
The panelist who objected was Tara Houska, who is Couchiching First Nation and a tribal attorney for Indigenous people. Tara told us to not use that phrase because it is offensive to First Nations people because we are using the phrase incorrectly.
Unbeknownst to the other panelists, we had been using an anglicized interpretation of “spirit animal” that had destroyed the spirit of the concept. We had unintentionally embraced a spiritless spirit animal. Our words spoke ethnocide and Geistmord, and we had engaged in a linguistic corruption similar to the redefining of “Kum Ba Yah.”
America’s ethnocidal culture encourages all of us to find our “spirit animals” by mutilating and disrespecting the traditions and cultures of Indigenous peoples, and it should be obvious that we cannot continue this cultural destruction.
Alebrijes and Cultivating Spirit
On Friday, when we opened the Altars Festival and visitors observed the various altars that each of our artists had created, they all asked about the meaning of various items on each altar.
Each item had a story, history, and justification for being on the altar. Every item had intention. Every item had a spirit. And it soon became obvious that the creation of an altar was not so much about finding the “right” items to place on the altar, but the act of infusing each item with spirit and intention.
The altars were not meaningless commodities for us to consume as entertainment. Each altar was the cultivation and manifestation of the spirit of each artist, and the hope is that these altars can empower others to make their own altars too.
The items on an altar could be the vivid manifestation of a glorious fever dream alongside cultural artifacts, and the photos of your ancestors.
An alebrije could have easily become merely the random images of a dream in 1936 that Pedro Linares decided to disregard because he was unsure how he could turn his dream into a profitable commodity, but instead he decided to infuse his spirit into his dream and now people believe that alebrijes can help guide their spirits in the afterlife.
We hope that the Altars Festival can inspire others to create altars and combat ethnocide, and this work requires that you infuse your work with your Geist and spirit.
The Altars Festival will be on display until December 10, 2021 so please come by STABLE arts at 336 Randolph Place NE, Washington, DC 20002 to experience this wonderful project.
Also, you can leave a memento or photo of an ancestor at The Sustainable Culture Lab’s altar (pictured below) created by artist and SCL Philosophy Fellow Jack Britton, and we look forward to watching this altar grow throughout the exhibition.