From the highlands of Ayutla Mixe to the most prominent intellectual spaces in Mexico, Yásnaya Elena A. Gil’s career as a linguist, writer and Ayuujk (Mixe) activist draws a path of resistance using her own unique voice, with diverse and original thinking, and a close connection to the Mixe community and its oral tradition. Her voice combines ancestral memories with languages that have often been silenced, including Mixe, a language with more than 100,000 speakers in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, and her mother tongue, which plays a starring role in this recital.

In this performance, the narrative and poetic voice of Yásnaya Elena A. Gil enters into a dialogue with the sound creations of the Ayuujk (Mixe) musical group Kumantuk Xuxpë. Sounds that evoke landscapes of southern Mexico—with indigenous roots and contemporary echoes—envelop the texts, as part of a project that advocates indigenous tradition as a possibility for the future and celebrates the strength of oral expression as a living form of thought. In this performance, Yásnaya Elena G. Aguilar and Kumantuk Xuxpë question the narrative that relegates indigenous peoples exclusively to the past, and they open up a space for imagining possible futures by drawing on roots, wind, and oral tradition.

From October to December 2025, Yásnaya Elena A. Gil is a writer with the CCCB Resident programme, the CCCB’s international residency, in collaboration with the UOC and with funding from the Fundació Privada MIR-PUIG.