Monument to Santa Anna’s Leg in Boston (2025)
Ikebana in Samsonite bag; 4:08-minute video excerpt from The Kingdom (2015): Bahrainuna (Our Bahrain) and video excerpt from Monument to Santa Anna’s Leg in Palestine (2019): Nice Legs; Digital print
Monument to Santa Anna’s Leg in Boston is a performance-installation rooted in an ongoing body of work that began in 2018 with Monument to Santa Anna’s Leg in Palestine. This evolving series examines the politics of loss, displacement, and imperial memory through live art, video, floral practice, and pedagogical performance.
The project emerged from a 2018 trip to Springfield, Illinois, where artist Jose Luis Benavides and I visited the grotesque site of General Santa Anna’s wooden leg—captured during the U.S. invasion of Mexico and displayed as a military trophy. That journey paralleled a broader excavation of colonial violence, linking the U.S.–Mexico War of 1848 with the Nakba of 1948 in Palestine. What does it mean to look for a missing leg? Or a missing land?
These questions echo through video excerpts and performance elements, including The Kingdom (2015): Bahrainuna, in which Lama, a Palestinian friend living in Jordan, sings the pre-2002 Bahraini anthem. Her fragile vocalization of “Our Bahrain” is a melancholic invocation of place, identity, and belonging among Arab diasporas. Bahrain—“two seas”—becomes a metaphor for the two coasts of the U.S., the shores of rupture and return.
This Boston iteration, presented as part of Willful Dialects, marks a decade of amputation—of limbs and lands, of memory and return. From The Kingdom (2015) to Monument to Santa Anna’s Leg in Palestine (2018), and now Boston (2025), the work unfolds as a proposal for a monument that refuses to stand still.
It blooms and mourns. It lectures and performs. It arrives in parts—Ikebana in a Samsonite, video fragments, digital print—packed, unpacked, re-staged. From Springfield’s military museum to the Distillery Gallery, from suitcase to battlefield, from Palestine to Boston. The monument moves.
At its core: Education Drag. A mode of resistance and mimicry, parodying institutional voice, exposing the violence in the language of curriculum, nationhood, and design. This monument plays its part in Patriots’ Day 2025: Battle of Lexington Reenactment—a performance-lecture staged as critique, a drag of the pedagogical self.
The Ikebana, created in collaboration with Hideko Shimizu, carries the delicacy of mourning, rooted in form and refusal. It is not fixed. It resists the bronze monument, resists memorial as mastery. It invites impermanence—fragile arrangements in a vessel built for transit.
Part of For Re-Orienting Asian American Studies: Container – Aesthetics of Critical Pedagogies, this work interrogates how histories are taught, staged, and remembered across diasporic bodies. Between the two coasts, the two seas, the two parades, and the amputated leg—this is a monument to what cannot be restored, but must be carried.
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