In Back and Forth and Back: The Many Returns of Emilio Rojas, performance theorist Rebecca Schneider traces the recurring gesture of return across Rojas’s practice—returning to wounds, ancestral knowledge, colonial histories, landscapes, and the body itself. Beginning with the xenophobic command “Go back to where you came from,” Schneider considers how Rojas turns the violence of this phrase back upon the histories of conquest and colonialism from which it emerged.

Moving through works including Heridas Abiertas (to Gloria), El Retorno, Go Back to Where You Came From (Santa María), Go Back to Where You Came From (Mayflower), and Instructions for Becoming, Schneider follows Rojas’s body as it rolls toward the ocean, repeatedly reopens the U.S.–Mexico border carved into his back, carries miniature colonial ships across Europe and the United States, burns them at sea, and entwines itself with the limbs and roots of trees.

For Schneider, return in Rojas’s work is never simply a journey backward or a search for origins. It becomes a way of confronting the histories that continue to inhabit bodies, landscapes, and everyday gestures. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa, Tiffany Lethabo King, Laura Aguilar, and Indigenous and Black feminist thought, Schneider asks what might happen when the command to “go back” is redirected toward conquest itself: What histories do we continue to carry? What can be shed, undone, or returned? And what other ways of becoming might emerge through the act of going back?