11 a.m.: We warm up to the beat of Argentine folk drums, the bombo legüero and caja coplera. It is hours until the march officially begins, but we are rancheando, or hanging out, exchanging compliments on our DIY costumes. The all-black looks evoke grunge, rock and roll, and steampunk. During the first rehearsal, we created a collective lattice from cloth, fishnet, wire, and backpack straps, each person adding something by knot or stitch. The following week, we dismantled it and incorporated pieces into each of our outfits. Pinned to our bodies are scraps of fabric we’ve stenciled with messages such as “Memory, Truth, and Justice” and “30,400,” the estimated number of people who were disappeared during Argentina’s last military dictatorship.
Today is March 24, the anniversary of the 1976 coup d’état that began the junta’s disastrous seven-year rule. Each year on this date, Argentines flood the streets to commemorate the victims of that era’s state violence and to say “never again” (“nunca más”). They carry banners, flags, and posters emblazoned with irreverent slogans, and even a few massive puppets satirizing the current government’s blue-uniformed police. Since 2013, Colectivo FindeUNmundO, or the “End of A World Collective,” an artist-activist group that aims to “knock down the walls between art and politics,” stages a performance at the march. This year, 216 volunteers, including myself, are performing a piece entitled “Collective Heartbeat,” accompanied by thirty-odd traditional folk drummers.
Colectivo FindeUNMundO (FUNO) functions on a participatory model, inviting volunteers to perform in actions throughout the year. The group has performed at the annual 24th of March protest, or 24M, for more than a decade. Like several others in the group, I was inspired to join after witnessing the group in action at last year’s march. My mother had lived through the dictatorship, but rarely talked about it. I recently moved from New York to Buenos Aires to pursue a writing project about the country’s rich tradition of artistic activist interventions. FUNO is part of this lineage, reinvigorated in the post-dictatorship era by legendary groups like the Grupo de Arte Callejero [Group of Street Artists] (GAC) and Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio [Daughters and Sons for Identity and Justice Against Forgetfulness and Silence] (H.I.J.O.S.).
Sebastián Martí, one of the original members of FUNO, defined its initial guiding principles as poetry and irony. Its first action, inspired by the work of Argentine fantasy writer Liliana Bodoc, took place in 2012, when many predicted the world would end. The year marked the end of a cycle in the Mayan Long Count calendar. The exact date of the action, October 12, also marked ten Mayan centuries since the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas. The group christened itself the “End of A World Collective,” calling for an end of the colonial era brought on by Columbus’s arrival, and celebrating the speculative beginning of a more just, equal future.
This March, our rehearsals took place on Sunday mornings in a large lot under the highway where we could practice walking, stopping, and dancing in unison. Teenagers, grandmothers, single mothers, groups of friends, we gathered in small circles to warm up with games of samurai and orchestra conductor. The vibe was one of jubilant inclusivity, almost cult-like, punctuated only by reminders by the organizers about the need to stay safe on the day of the protest. Lurking in the background was the knowledge that this year, we would face an increased threat to our physical safety because President Javier Milei had been ratcheting up his repression of civil society. Less than two weeks before, at the order of the Ministry of Security, the police had cracked down on the weekly pensioner protest in the capital. More than a hundred people were arrested and over a dozen were injured.
And then, just hours before the march, Milei’s office released a nineteen-minute video in which conservative thinker Agustín Laje refuted the long-established estimate that more than thirty thousand people had been disappeared by the junta. Laje pointedly attempted to shift focus to the violence of left-wing “terrorists” active before the coup. When democracy was restored in Argentina in the eighties, the country unified around a shared understanding that the dictatorship’s leaders had perpetrated systemic human rights abuses against their own people and that this should never happen again. Milei, friend of Donald Trump and Elon Musk, is the first Argentine president in four decades of democracy to deviate with such determination from this consensus. In this political climate, just showing up is an act of resistance. The steady heartbeat of the drums feels like protection, like we are learning how to hold our ground.
1:30 p.m.: We begin walking down Avenida de Mayo toward Avenida 9 de Julio. The day is overcast, threatening to rain. Then the sun comes out and it is hot, humid, like being in a greenhouse. At the intersection with 9 de Julio, the two huge avenues create a kind of plaza. Traffic has been stopped and we spread out in the massive rectangular space. A miles-long red cord held by our friends and family separates us from the crowd and creates a stage.