In Oaxaca, in the Zapotec region of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the gender binary falters in the face of the muxe’, people who are born with male genitalia 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 that the muxe’ have been subjected to. This 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 contemporary society. Because when the political significance of a body becomes a class struggle or dissent, hegemony, oriented toward maintaining its power structure, flexes its muscle to validate the same old narrative, 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.
