Michelle Ha

This project follows “henequén,” a term colloquially used in Mexico to refer to agaves and agave fibers from the Yucatán Peninsula that, in (South) Korea, has been transliterated and applied to Koreans who were trafficked into indentured servitude on Mexican plantations in 1905 as well as the migration itself as an “event” in Korean history. Attending to the metonymic function of “henequén” to spin the human and nonhuman stories together, “Fiber Optics” excavates the shared infrastructures conditioning transoceanic mobilities and accommodates the oscillation between the structural/individual and plant/fiber, thereby incorporating both syncretic and diachronic study of scale and process. This project engages with multimodal ethnographic and archival methods to explain how knowledge of Yucatán's agave diversity and Maya fiber technologies has been limited by the imposition of decorticating machines and monocrop agriculture, including hands-on skills training in agave identification, cultivation, and fiber processing skills.