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The first thing I would like to talk about “Making presence” is the construction of the chapter: the diverse characteristics of the materials used to frame Regina José Galindo’s artistic practice, materials diverse in terms of temporalities and in genres. The Rabinal Achi, from the sixteenth-century is presented as evidence of the K’iche Mayan treatment of the enemy as equal, in opposition to the humiliations and extreme violence of Efraín Ríos Montt’s military dictatorship’s treatment to Mayan peoples (although, the Ixiles) during 1982 and 1983, as well as that described by de las Casas during the first part of the colony.
These movements through time and through the different registers of what counts as historical narration and evidence allows us to think that Taylor is not only proposing the title of her book, ¡Presente! —title which continuously appears (se presenta) throughout the chapter–, as the act of being there at a specific moment, but as a temporally complex act that is ever present: since the beginning of the colony, she corrects Foucault (115), biopolitics have been stablished, constructing a racio-sexual hierarchy that according to those two dimensions (among some others such as gender, able-bodiedness/mindedness…) enabled a system that could extract value from certain bodies as if they were not human, or as if they were from different human value. These power relations have been continued without interruption even after the formation of the modern states, the examples Taylor brings into play demonstrate just that, how else could a first lady explicitly demonstrate she, and therefore the power she represents, didn’t care about migrant children held in cages in the border? Taylor proposes that “Not caring, in fact, has been promoted as hip and attractive in today’s U.S. culture (122), but she also illustrates how the same has happened among the soldiers from Ríos Montt’s militia, among the conquerors, warrios and looters of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries.
If a foucauldian genealogy is aimed at showing the subjugated knowledges, we could say that these constitute a genealogy as well, because, even if Taylor is showing the subjugating, she enables us to read on the other side the resistance and the fact that the subjugated never completely disappeared, we can trace back their existence, and in fact we can find those traces in the present, in our own bodies if we are willing to accept the responsability. Regina José Galindo’s work is important because she is one of the few willing to take up the task of remembering and of re-presenting those who are being erased over and over. The examples given by Taylor also show that the way we (mis)treat the other not only speaks more about ourselves that of the other, but also ends up undermining our own personhood. When “Life apparently goes on” (107) for some, in actuality their lives, stripping others of human value, are at the same time being stripped of humanity. Biopolitics aim to create a population that being there can be absent from communal life, therefore, open to be massacred without recognizing a problem that needs immediate action. So the question is not whether something can be done, but what are we doing (126). Being presente is the opposite of inaction, it is something that has had to be done ever since limitless violence started and until it keeps going, even after that.
Taylor, Diana. 2020. "Making Presence" ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence. 105-126. New York University: Duke University Press,