Mi bosque es el tianguis, estos injertos son mi lengua

My trees are the plastic tarps: pink canopies in spring, blue during the rainy season. Like foliage, they let rays of sunlight or streams of water through their gaps. My branches are the intersecting tubes and ropes, creating paths through which time and bustle flow: the cries of vendors, the shrill sound of a broken speaker, the babble of haggling, the tapping of shoes on the pavement...That noise was my first language: the sound that taught my ear and shaped my speech, turning the chaos of the tianguis into a living forest where I learned to listen and speak.

Comprising video, drawing, and installation, this project explores the artist’s own linguistic dichotomy, rooted in the loss and subsequent search for his mother tongue: the P’urhépecha spoken by his grandparents, faltering in his parents’ generation and nearly forgotten among young people in Cherán, the generation to which Xharicata belongs. The tension between his P’urhépecha origins and the Spanish imposed through the asymmetrical relations inherited from the colonial period is associated by the artist with the concept of grafting—a common botanical practice involving the joining of plant tissue onto another already-rooted plant, which he observed in his paternal grandfather, who would graft peaches onto tejocote trees.

This metaphor serves as a model for illustrating the way something can continue to exist by taking form in something else: For Salvador, language and identity are systems of practices, gestures, and forms shaped by constant processes of hybridization and mutation. Grafting appears throughout the exhibition in the form of stems of nurite, a plant that grows in the ravines of Cherán and is used to relieve anxiety and digestive ailments.