Reading Arendt and Butler this week, as bodies of students covered the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco in remembrance of the Tlatelolco Massacre, felt particularly fitting. As a daughter of two survivors, the understanding of the relation of power to the space of appearance has been incredibly important in my work both as a thinker and a doer. Arendt’s analysis of power was incredibly helpful as I continue to try and understand in my own work how do popular cultural forms, specifically dance forms, establish collective power within the space of appearance. “Power is that keeps the public realm, the potential space of appearance between acting and speaking men, in existence. (…) While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanish the moment they disperse (Arendt, 200).” It is this moment of acting together, and furthermore, dancing together, that carries particular importance for me. As Arendt points out early in her text: “Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act (Arendt, 188)”. Collective action and collective movement can establish difference without separation while simultaneously asserting a political claim. As Butler points out, the acting and living of the body: “is always conditioned acting.” So if our acting is always conditioned, even within the powerful framework of the collective, how is it that action and movement establish a positioning of the body against, within, and beyond these conditions? This question still rings in my head, however Butler’s analysis and insistence of how bodies are informed by the conditions of precarity is incredibly helpful: “́Precarity ́designates that politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support more than others, and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death. (Butler, 33).” So, I wonder, how do forms of popular cultural and creative expression oppose precarity? How does dance transform the space of appearance? How is it that the actions of combos reggaetonero in Mexico City, a Colombiano crews in Monterrey, established such a powerful presence within the space of appearance that they were persecuted and eliminated? Even when their lives already existed within a state of precarity, and thus a state of elimination. How does this double extermination of humans that are not eligible for recognition within the sphere of appearance operate and affect a body politic?