Maria De Victoria stood outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan at sunrise, wearing a coat printed with words that weren't hers: "I'm not mad at you, dude." They belonged to Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis poet and mother whose death at the hands of a federal agent has become a flashpoint in the escalating conflict between immigrant communities and ICE enforcement.
Good's final words, spoken moments before she was shot, have traveled to protest lines in Los Angeles, Washington, and Chicago. Now they live in De Victoria's voice—repeated, chanted, held aloft through an eight-hour performance that ended at sunset with silence.
Speaking the Unseen
De Victoria, who immigrated from Peru and was once undocumented herself, framed the action as both personal testimony and refusal. "I stand with innocent people living under systemic violence," she explained in a statement. "By speaking these words aloud in public, I invite passersby to reckon with what is too often unseen, unheard, or ignored."
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Start Your News DetoxThe performance happened in a city now occupied by federal troops—New York, another sanctuary city watching its promises tested by executive order. Officers stood nearby, barricades up. De Victoria chanted anyway, her presence a kind of witness that doesn't ask permission or expect applause. She didn't acknowledge observers. The coat and the mantra were the statement.
This isn't De Victoria's first endurance work. Last June, during Pride Month, she attempted to sing for 24 hours at the NYC AIDS Memorial Park, honoring lives lost to the epidemic and the disproportionate toll on marginalized communities. She's staged performances in bodegas, laundromats, hardware stores—ordinary spaces where people move through their days. In 2024, she co-founded Artists and Mothers, an organization that funds emerging and midcareer artists who are mothers, recognizing the economic walls they face in a city where survival itself is a luxury.
Her philosophy is simple and rooted in observation: "Even if you march by yourself, somebody else will join, and eventually you will create a movement." Good ideas, she believes, start with one person. They evolve from there.
What happens next depends partly on whether people like Lynne Lakshmi Pidel—present at the plaza, already calling senators—keep pushing. De Victoria's work doesn't end the conversation. It just refuses to let it die.
