ABOUT

Aria “Lune” Acevedo (she/they) is a detribalized Indigenous Latine actor, designer, writer, and educator from the San Antonio area. Her work focuses on the importance of honest and authentic intersectional representation of the Latine experience. Aria is specifically interested in exploring the Mexican-American and detribalized experience, the Queer identity, and life with mental illness and disabilities. Her writing explores and combines different mediums of storytelling and ritual.

Aria is this year’s resident playwright with Play Incubation Collective where she is developing her play Return to Abya Yala. The play focuses on identity within the Indigenous community. It follows the journey of Xo who is detribalized and seeking reconnection to roots lost from centuries of colonization and generations of assimilation that carry trauma into the future. This future may look to the settler’s eye like an apocalyptic dystopia, but for Indigenous peoples, it could be the time to finally regain stewardship of the land and heal.

Songwriting Prompts for Going to Find Our Peopleafter Aria “Lune” Acevedo’s Return to Abya YalaBy Diana Alvarez

What do we do for the dead? Do we arrange flowers during a rainstorm, simmer caldo con sonrisitas, wail, wrestle with the weight of colonization, wait for them, wait for our languages to return to us, fight in their stead? How do our dead transform culture and power through memory? Do our dead labor as cultural workers beyond their exploitation in this life? Do they/we ever rest?

“Every generation has some burden to carry from the last generation…when will we not have that–when will we just live?” -from Return to Abya YalaWhen I sleep for my ancestors, I wake hungry. Did they know rest? Did they know full-bodied pleasure? Did they wonder about the hunger of generations before and after theirs? What universes were held in their small gestures of in-between–small smiles, stirring of the pot, reminiscing, daydreaming?

“You could go find your people,” our artists tell us. Witness one another on the journey, and your tools will be made clear. Listen to one another. Hold silence as awe. “Community will bring healing,” another artist says. What are your most quiet songs? Where is your wailing voice? Where is your rage? What songs do your ancestors yearn to sing? Will you find them?

We will not keep telling our stories and singing our songs in languages meant to destroy us. What are your asymmetrical songs? What are your melodies that break free from expected patterns? Where does your voice bump, curl, and break? How will we BREAK THIS? Will you tell us that we are okay? Will you play?