Animal spirits wander through the night. Bruises appear on people‘s bodies. Echoes of displacement and slavery of Afro-descendants find resonance in the melancholic landscapes of the Mexican Costa Chica.
In the darkness of the night tonos roam and cross paths – animal spirits that share their life with a human being. If something happens to one of them, the same will happen to the other.
When tonos get hurt, people wake up with bruises on their skin. When people disperse, the tonos are lost.
Ester, a jaguar woman who remembers the fleeing of her ancestors, accompanies women who are about to give birth. Santos looks after his cattle and lives in the river as an alert crocodile. While pulling fishing nets up from a boat, Juli swims in the sea like a fish. Without leaving home, Don Chico searches for animals in the wild, a mountain lion that heals people’s wounds.
Through landscapes that reflect dispossession and abandonment, Moretones interweaves the history of Afro-descendant slavery with the environmental devastation on the Costa Chica of Mexico. It is said that, nowadays, to have a tono is a danger to be kept secret.
