If You Can Talk, You Can Sing
By Emily Withnall
My Aunt Kate had a poster in her living room that I liked to look at as a kid. It featured two Zimbabwean women in colorful clothing with their arms extended and hands linked. A proverb at the top of the poster read:
If you can walk
You can dance
If you can talk
You can sing.
The image was imbued with color and joy, but I appreciated the message most. Expression is an essential part of the human experience, and art is meant to be shared, passed down, and created in community. The proverb from Zimbabwe encouraged me to see art as accessible to everyone. No specific skill level or access to special groups or spaces is required to participate.
In keeping with this proverb, the essays and articles in this issue of El Palacio affirm the necessity of creation for surviving and thriving. In RoseMary Diaz’s article about Makowa: The Worlds Above Us, a new exhibition at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, storytelling is central to the ways we make sense of the world, our place in it, and what we know from all that we can see in the sky—from stars to birds to clouds. Jon Ghahate (Laguna Pueblo/Zuni Pueblo) tells Diaz, “If we allow ourselves to be open to the contributions of other societies and civilizations and their place in the cosmos, perhaps we can focus more on the commonalities among us rather than the differences between us.”
For Aboriginal artist, Cynthia Burke, art is generational and rooted in the Australian bush. As writer Gina Rae La Cerva relays through her profile of Burke, Dreamtime creation stories are imbued with cultural knowledge that often takes the form of artistic expression. A vendor at the International Folk Art Market in 2024, Burke’s fiber art sculptures are an important source of income with deep ties to the Ngaanyatjarra community. Likewise, Dr. Gregory Cajete (Tewa/Santa Clara Pueblo) finds profound meaning in the process of creation. Cajete tells writer Jamie Figueroa that humans are an expression of creation: “Let go and become the music and the dance of creation. Embody what you create.” His words amplify the Zimbabwean proverb—across cultures, creation is a global inheritance.
In Simón Romero’s essay about his mother, Janet Stein Romero, readers will encounter another artist and teacher with an insatiable curiosity and love for folk arts. Romero was my high school art teacher, (and fittingly, a friend of my Aunt Kate!), and I can attest that she brought this passion into her teaching and into the communities of Villanueva and Las Vegas. A prolific artist, Romero was big-hearted and fearless. As her son recounts, she understood that people have always created art in the face of oppression.
Creation is also integral to the ways we pass knowledge through generations. For some groups, history has been purposefully obscured. Artist Chris E. Vargas approaches the erasure of queer and trans history by interrogating museums and archives as sites of memory. Who and what do these institutions serve? For Vargas, as writer Jake Skeets reveals, the gaps in the archive provide a space of infinite possibility for imagining and reimagining our past and possible futures.
In a similar vein, Lazarus Letcher reconstructs the history of Buffalo Soldier Cathay Williams, a woman who dressed as a man to serve in the 38th Infantry Regiment after the Civil War. By weaving Williams’s words and records, Black history in New Mexico, and their own family history, Letcher creates an understanding of what it can take to seek liberation.
Whether donning different clothing to forge a new life, passing along inherited stories or artforms, or embracing the process of experimentation, this issue of El Palacio is an invitation to participate in creative expression.