Mangos with Chili: Two-Spirit, Queer and Trans People of Colour Performance as Social Movement Building

Abstract

Mangos with Chili (MWC) is a two-spirit, queer and trans people of color (2-QTPOC) performance arts cabaret based in the San Francisco Bay Area. This research focuses on MWC performance content and personal interviews with four of MWC’s artists: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Landa Lakes, Micha Cárdenas and Manish Vaidya. The author examines three aspects of MWC to consider: the economic context of precarity of cultural work; spirituality and healing in performance; and the politics of vulnerability and interdependence. By examining the challenges MWC faces and the methods MWC offers for social justice movement building, the author argues that MWC offers a politics and set of practices that hold difference affirmatively while leaving enough space to imagine and enact new worlds.