Estafiate: Music for Plants - An Immersive Music Experience

Estafiate, A Performance by Teletextile

Saturday, March 16, 2024, 6PM

FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Ruby City’s Chris Park 111 Camp St, San Antonio, TX 78204

Estafiate is an immersive music-theater work by San Antonio-based musician & composer Pamela Martinez, who performs under the moniker Teletextile, presented in multiple locations in Chris Park. This performance is inspired by the healing nature of the plants of Texas, dreams, and ancestry. This performance is made possible by a grant from the City of San Antonio Department of Arts & Culture.

Estafiate is a plant grown in my grandmother’s garden on the west side of San Antonio, TX which I saw her use as an herbal remedy for her stomach aches during her final battle with cancer when I returned home to River City from Brooklyn, NY to help care for her in 2018.  Estafiate is a Spanish word pronounced [es.t̪aˈfja.t̪e].  The etymology of this word is from Classical Nahuatl or the Aztec language.

Throughout my childhood my grandmother and I would take walks in our west side neighborhood and she would point out plants along the way that could help or hurt us.  She knew plants that would bring on a menstruation, she knew plants to cure a stomach ache.  She knew many things, but also kept this knowledge in whispers and secrets because Grandma had somehow been made to believe this knowledge might make her seem like a witch by her church community. Knowing these plants were both sacred and secret left my imagination to wonder.  From those wonderings about the mystery of Estafiate grew my next experimental and introspective play that leans towards meditative sketches of poetic moments for the audience.

I now live in Grandma’s home and tend to her garden of sacred herbs and plants.  After grandma Sara passed in spring of 2019 Estafiate’s mystery started my journey into herbalism and remains a connection to my now passed grandmother. In English, Estafiate has many names, Mexican White Sage, Mexican Sagebrush, Mugwort.  Most people I met in my research (who were using this plant as medicine) were of an older generation and knew it solely as Estafiate. It took me some time to find its English name(s).

With Estafiate, I want to give people the opportunity to get curious about their natural world again; the sky, the plants, the smell of the air.  I saw healing in grandma’s garden, in her Estafiate, in her roses, in her aloe vera, in her orange trees, but I also saw healing in the little botanics that line the streets of the west side, and the river as it flows along the mission trail.  And I can tell I’m not the only one taking interest in the rediscovery and uplifting of local knowledge held by so many grandmothers, so many gardens, so many oral histories and so many forgotten stories. This work is an altar to those things we have forgotten, but somehow still flow through our blood, our river and our roots.

I believe this personal story I have with my grandmother, as it relates to the sacred plants of this region and the complexities of those of us who have fallen off the chain of knowledge for what our ancestors possessed, is an important one.  People of my generation younger and older are seeking to reconnect with our roots both metaphorically and literally.  I hope in this work I can build bridges of knowledge for health and wellbeing that grandmothers would like to pass on to their children, grandchildren and grandchildren’s children.