On October 24 th , 1871, 20 Chinese men were tortured and hanged in downtown LA. This mass lynching—the largest in U.S. history—took place on Calle de los Negros, named for its original inhabitants: dark-skinned Californios of indigenous, African, and Spanish blood. This coincidence of space insists: the American story, of migration and displacement, is a palimpsest—a parchment written on, erased, then written on again, the traces of the old words ghosting underneath the new. Virginia Grise’s rasgos asiaticos looks to a history that’s been (imperfectly) erased: Chinese settlement in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It's about moving bodies and porous borders—How do you make a home in inhospitable country?

rasgos asiaticos is part hybrid-book—comprising drafts of scenes, splinters of text and poetry, as well as non- textual source material—and part multimedia performance—creating a mosaic of layered voices (speaking English, Spanish, and Cantonese), music, and movement. Director Shayok Misha Chowdhury has selected pieces of the book to excavate in this performance about moving bodies and porous borders, which aims to re- imagine how we think about immigration in the US-Mexico borderlands.