In Oaxaca, in the Zapotec region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the gender binary falters before the muxe’, people who are born with male genitals but who renounce their potential symbolic power to embrace the feminine. Elvis Guerra proposes in Ramonera a critique not only of the exclusion or violence exercised against bodies that identify with peripheral identities but also of the mythification to which the muxe’ have been subjected. It is a radical revision of the epic concerning a marginalized minority, aimed at reclaiming their Zapotec culture and practices that are fully in line with the recent contemporary society. Because when the political meaning of a body becomes class struggle or dissent, hegemony, oriented toward maintaining its power structure, flexes its muscle to validate the same old story, leaving some lives out, casting them aside and, at the same time, embracing them under mechanisms of control, like parasites, like a virus. That is why we need poetry to be an act of political resistance. That is why we need to hear the voice of Elvis Guerra.
