In the afterlife of the 1980s Salvadoran Civil War, Jubilant Emigration turns toward the lives of trans femme sex workers who moved within and against its violence– tending to soldiers, making kin, surviving in La Praviana, San Salvador. An obsolete railway returns here, not as history but as body. Once used to move militia through the city’s red-light districts, the Salvadoran National Railway is refigured as a site of pleasure and refusal. A four-foot span of an antique silver bullet railcar opens inward, its interior thick with adornment, softness, and excess. What once carried bodies toward violence now holds them otherwise– suspended in joy, erotic labor, and ancestral presence. Military remnants press against fabrics, toys, and jewels; the line between harm and tenderness loosens, frays, reforms.

Plywood, dowels, cotton fabric, polyester fill, beads, faux flowers, paint, jewelry, photographs, sex toys, toy guns, tassels, military garments, stuffed dolls, video projection.