Buried Beneath: Bombs & Latte is a 50 minute solo performance work written, composed, and performed by Dakota Camacho. 

 

This hip-hop theater piece weaves poetry, traditional chant, historical analysis and memoir to tell dakota's story of coming out and coming home.

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Militarization buries queer identity beneath Indigenous identity beneath the pressure to assimilate to a society built on obliterating the Native. In this seemingly impossible dilemma, Camacho struggles to choose both yo'ña (their) Indigenous culture and queer life ways despite the ways colonization tries to dispossess and destroy both.

 

The title of the piece draws attention to the Matao/CHamoru ancestral practice of burying one's ancestors beneath the Latte - the ancient megaliths that hold up traditional CHamoru home's.  Many of these sacred sites have now been desecrated by the US Militarization for the purpose of storing bombs below the earth. As these sites have been bulldozed and the people dispossessed of their relationship to ancestral lands, so to have CHamoru people lost sight of how to care for and nurture what we currently call 'queer' relatives.

 

How does a young queer Native Pacific Islander navigate healing and cultural reclamation in the context of Toxic masculinity, syncretic Catholicism, mili-tourism, and a family of war survivors. 

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When bombs erupt, dakota re-carves family, to heal from generations of trauma.

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A previous iteration of the work was conceived, written, & performed by Eva Chamorrita Aguon Cruz and Moñeka De Oro at the Mariånas History Conference in Saipan in 2012.