Ancestor Stories and Community Care in Virginia Grise’s Rasgos Asiaticos

On 19 May 2024, I arrive in the southern California sunshine for my first ever visit to Los Angeles’s Chinatown. As an east coaster, I half expect to find the familiar grittiness of New York’s Chinatown. I am surprised by the bright airiness of LA Chinatown’s central pedestrian plaza. The colorful buildings look Chinese—from the outside, at least—given their tiled roofs with curling, elongated corners. Red paper lanterns are strung throughout the plaza, which is flanked by two imposing Chinatown gates. The buildings around the square house commercial spaces like souvenir shops, a bakery, and a print shop.

I have come to see Rasgos Asiaticos, a site-specific performance installation. Created by playwright Virginia Grise in collaboration with set designer Tanya Orellana, Rasgos narrates the legacy of Chinese Mexicans and engages themes of gender, race, migration, and colonial displacement in the United States-Mexico borderlands. The performance takes place across North Hill Street in the West Plaza, home of the Automata Theater. At the check-in table, I am offered a moon cake and map of the installations throughout plaza. While the audience mills around the door to Automata, the performance starts quietly at the end of the plaza near the Earth installation. Earth is a large crate full of soil and a speaker that plays Grise’s voice on loop, saying “a piece of history, a memory from this town built new by the people displaced, far away from what once was…here, in this town, the people are being displaced, again. What do they hold onto? What do we bury?” Performer Lydia Jialu Li reverently lights a stick of incense and places it in the soil. She speaks to herself in English, Chinese, and Spanish, reciting what seems to be a grocery list and fragments of memory. She slowly walks, drawing the audience toward her around the fountain and into the front door of Automata.

The performance’s opening signals its rootedness in the particulars of place. Rasgos Asiaticos is a multimedia performance piece that Grise has been developing for more than fifteen years. This iteration of Rasgos was supported by California Institute of the Arts and designed specifically for this site. Its installations are intentionally placed in relation to the buildings and architecture of the plaza. Moreover, elements of the performance incorporate both local and transnational histories as well as community participation. In her opening monologue, Li remarks that she is on “an ancestral walk from the Old Chinatown to the New Chinatown.” This, alongside the Earth recording’s reference to “people displaced,” calls attention to local histories of displacement, urban renewal, and gentrification.

As Rasgos alludes to these legacies of gentrification and displacement, it re-instantiates an act of space-claiming.

Automata is located in LA’s New Chinatown; the original Chinatown was destroyed in the 1930s when the Union Station was built on its site. Chinese migrants first began arriving to the United States in substantive numbers in the mid-nineteenth century, when the abolition of slavery coincided with the need for low-wage racialized labor in industries like agriculture, mining, and railroad construction. Over time, nativist backlash led to the passage of a series of restrictive laws culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned all Chinese immigration until its repeal in 1943. Around this time, LA’s Chinatown begun to establish itself as Chinese immigrants increasingly settled adjacent to Sonoratown, a Mexican enclave around the Old Plaza. In The Power of Chinatown, Laureen D. Hom notes that Old Chinatown’s location at the edge of an industrial area reflects the city’s history of racial marginalization and housing segregation. As Old Chinatown grew, the city treated it as a slum, withholding social services and refraining from structural improvements. During its 1920s program of urban renewal, the city built City Hall and other civic institutions near the Old Plaza and widened the streets, demolishing Old Chinatown. In the 1930s, a group of Chinese business owners organized the development of a modernized New Chinatown. This was decorated in a neo-Chinese style and housed restaurants, souvenir shops, and other businesses designed to attract tourists; eventually, it would grow into a community-serving space for Chinese Americans. Hom argues that through this project, Chinese community leaders asserted belonging, community control, and self-representation, even as they faced the exclusions of immigration laws and other forms of racism. As Rasgos alludes to these legacies of gentrification and displacement, it re-instantiates an act of space-claiming. I understand this from the beginning of the performance, which begins without an overt signal that it’s starting. In other words, the frame of Rasgos is coextensive with the quotidian goings-on of West Plaza.

Automata’s interior is awash with soft light and bright color; the lower half of the walls are painted bright red, and they fade to white near the ceiling. Floor-to-ceiling banners feature text from the performance, and the space is furnished like the inside of a home. Crates of whole oranges are set throughout the room, as are platters of sliced oranges. The powerful scent of sweet orange diffuses throughout the space. Framed black-and-white family photographs sit atop a stack of three suitcases placed on the floor. The audience packs in, standing or sitting on the furniture and red Turkish rugs on the floor. We are coming together in an intimate space, cocooned away from the bustling city. The two performer-guides—Li and Marlene Beltran—approach the center of the room. Li and Beltran mirror one another as they slowly set up a record player in the center of the room, push play, and murmur to themselves in Spanish and Chinese as if translating the words spoken on the record. I hear, “I am searching for my dead ancestors at the markets in Monterrey…the Chinese restaurants in Tampico…in the newspapers from Sonora…at the henequen plantations in the Yucatan…in forgotten photos from Arizona.”

This focus on migration and ancestral memory continues as the performers orient us to the performance. I follow Beltran out of the theatre and into the Plaza. She introduces herself by marking her positionality as a first-generation Chicana born and raised in Los Angeles, whose parents arrived in California by way of Mexicali. Beltran then asks each audience member where their family is from. The answers were varied—New York, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Mexico, Ohio, Canton, China. Rasgos is a text that considers the forging of identity and community in the context of migration and displacement, and it thus invites the audience to participate in this work. Beltran invites us to explore the space however we would like, and I start with the Ocean installation.

Ocean is an upright wooden box that is open on one side; I approach it via a shallow wooden ramp set atop a layer of sand. Soft blue light illuminates the inside of the box, which features several concentric circles. From the innermost circle, I hear the sound of the ocean—waves lapping against the side of a ship, perhaps—and a recording of a woman’s voice speaking a love poem or a memory. She speaks about breathing with the rise and fall of the waves, as if the sea can carry breath to a loved one far away. As if an ancestral spirit, Li moves airily through the space and offers me a conch shell; I hold it to my ear and hear a recording of the ocean. Ocean is wistful and creates the impression of Chinese diaspora and transpacific affective attachments. Yet, in order to move from Ocean at the edge of the plaza into the rest of the performance space, one must pass by the Immigration installation.

Immigration features another upright wooden box with a mirror inside and is closed off by a chain-link fence. Floodlights sit atop the box. Standing outside, I see my reflection in the mirror through the fence. It looks like I’m in a cage. A recording relates the history of United States immigrant detention and the Chinese Exclusion Act. The installation’s monotonous recording, harsh lighting, and metallic coldness evoke the violence of the contemporary United States-Mexico border. The installation thus brings contexts of Chinese and Mexican immigration into relation.

I wander to the Ancestor Story installation at the opposite end of the plaza, where Feng Feng Yeh, founder of the Chinese Chorizo Project, is giving a cooking demonstration. (Yeh is also a collaborator for the Tucson, Arizona activation of Rasgos, slated for early 2026). We are making Zongzi—sticky rice dumplings cooked in banana leaves, which Yeh says are analogous to tamales. The installation is draped with colorful lanterns and lights, as well as leaf-wrapped Zongzi dangling from strings. The table bears bowls of ingredients: sticky rice, cooked egg yolk, mushrooms, and Chinese chorizo. While we assemble the Zongzi, Yeh traces the genealogy of Chinese chorizo through the diasporic Chinese community of Tucson. During the Chinese Exclusion era, folks suffering economic hardship made chorizo by combining Mexican spices with meat scraps and cheap end-cuts purchased on credit from Chinese-owned grocery shops. Yeh says that making Zongzi reminds us of the labor of these ancestors who nourished one another and helped one another survive; she asserts that “the act of cooking and eating our ancestors’ foods [can] reconnect the strained relationships to ourselves, our elders, and to one another.” As if to demonstrate this, an elder woman from the neighborhood who has wandered into the Plaza approaches Yeh and speaks to her in Chinese. I surmise that the neighbor is asking about the cooking, since Yeh’s response includes the word “Zongzi.” The neighbor says, “ah!” and lights up with a smile. Invoking solidarity and community care, Yeh invites us to participate in the labor of making this food. I fold my banana leaf in my hand and spoon in small amounts of each ingredient. I sloppily roll the leaf closed and tie it off with a piece of string, realizing the time and effort it must take to hone this skill.

I wander away from Ancestor Story and down the stunning Piñata Lantern Alley. A narrow space between two buildings is strung with low-hanging colorful piñatas in the shapes of globes, horses, and stars. Some piñatas are illuminated as if they were Chinese paper lanterns, and others quietly play audio recordings of women’s voices speaking in English, Spanish, or Chinese. One lantern says, “En La Ciudad de Mexico, hay un barrio chino que comienza en la esquina de Indepencia y Dolores”; it then repeats the phrase in Chinese and English, as if it were a language lesson. Another says wistfully, “China is a place, someplace very far away from here.” A quiet corner at the end of the alley is covered with votives, and a broken piñata sits on the ground with flowers blooming out of it. I linger in the alley and contemplate how the multiplicity of languages and voices evokes the experience of the borderlands.

Adjacent to the alley is the Sky installation. From the outside, Sky looks like a plain plywood shed. The inside, however, is spectacular—I enter it alone and shut the door behind me. The lower portion of the walls is covered in shingles to look like a rooftop, and the upper portion is illuminated like a sunset with fiery colors at the horizon fading into a starry blue ceiling. A record player projects Grise’s voice speaking a memory of her uncle Andrés, who migrated to Mexico from China. The voice remembers Andrés as a gentle person who protected and cared for her by making a special spot for her to eat her meals on the roof. She remembers, “My tío kept me on the roof close to the sky because he knew how dangerous it could be for little girls to let their feet touch the earth. On top of a flat roof in Mexico I ate white rice with soy sauce.” The voice quiets, and the record continues to play soothing lo-fi music. I revel in this private moment of pleasure, feeling peaceful and safe.

Stepping outside under the soft glow of the red paper lanterns against the darkening sky, I walk toward the Home installation. Home is set in an upright wooden crate whose four sides are open and dropped down to the floor in a configuration that’s reminiscent of a crossroads. Antique wooden furniture is strewn about on its sides or toppled upside down. A record plays an elder woman’s voice speaking a memory of leaving an abusive husband. Yet the disordered furniture has soil and flowers sprouting from it; the scene not only represents violence, but also the possibility of flourishing in its aftermath.

Each performer contributes to Rasgos’s wrap-up. Beltran begins singing loudly in Spanish to call everyone back. She slowly walks inside Automata and trims the stems off a bouquet of peonies before putting them in a vase. Li relates a story about how peonies connect her with the memory of her grandmother in China. Then, dramaturg Omi Osun Joni L. Jones comes forward to offer a meta-commentary on the performance. Jones also invites us to interact with some of the artifacts in the space; production manager Maricella Infante has taken the cardboard boxes that the materials for the play sets came in and made journals. We are invited to write reflections in the journals or to embroider their cardboard covers with brightly colored thread. Infante has also made cardboard-covered booklets that contain excerpts from the play script, which we are invited to read. Yeh tells us that she has been interviewing community members throughout the day and recording their solidarity recipes—she invites us to step behind a curtain and listen to them in a private booth. They exhort us to take home some of the dozens of oranges, as well.

Rasgos Asiaticos unearths hidden histories that unsettle our commonsense understandings of race and identity. When I recently spoke to Grise about how she began working on this project, she suggested that borderlands histories have failed to tell the story of Chinese Mexicans. Indeed, as historian Jason Oliver Chang has argued, though diasporic Chinese were vital members of the Mexican workforce and community in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they were excluded from the national identity that emerged during the Mexican Revolution. In defiance of this historical erasure, the elements of Rasgos suggest the merging of cultures and forging of a Chinese Mexican identity. I see this in the symbolism of the piñata lanterns, the Chinese chorizo, the presence of oranges (grown in the borderlands but native to China), and the layering of English, Spanish, and Chinese languages throughout the performance. Thus, Rasgos asserts the vibrant presence of Chinese Mexicans—past and present.

By allowing its audience to enjoy and create art and food together, Rasgos urges us to experiment with non-hierarchical ways of being with one another that can begin to move us beyond the confines of colonialism and racist patriarchy.

Rasgos also shines a light on entangled histories of migration, colonialism, and displacement at various scales. It not only traces legacies of migration and exclusion in the borderlands and the transpacific; it also critiques the hyper-local history of gentrification in New Chinatown and its enmeshment with Indigenous dispossession and African enslavement. Yet, as the performance acknowledges these legacies, it also serves as an act of claiming space. As Osun states in her closing remarks, “This evening, we decided that the degradation that happened on this land, and of the Chumash, of the Tongva, of Chinese, Mexican, and African-descended people that happened right here—we gather to offer up a different story. A different set of possibilities, because there are other ways for us to be humans together.” Rasgos thus offers a challenge to the divide-and-conquer tactics that pit racialized minorities against one another in struggles for power and resources. Just as Rasgos demands collaboration among its creators and performers, it also invites the audience to participate in co-creating a little world. By allowing its audience to enjoy and create art and food together, Rasgos urges us to experiment with non-hierarchical ways of being with one another that can begin to move us beyond the confines of colonialism and racist patriarchy. It was a gift to be present for this experiment in possibility.