In Iquitos, artist Kay Zevallos steps into the Itaya River while menstruating, confronting a childhood warning about the pink river dolphin. Her performances argue the bufeo myth has been twisted to mask sexual violence, from rubber boom days to now.

A River Fear Learned Young

The first thing you notice in Kay Zevallos Villegas’s story is how ordinary it begins. A child is being told not to go near the water. A warning delivered as common sense. A rule that sounds protective until you grow old enough to hear what it is really doing.

In the Peruvian Amazon, most people have heard of the bufeo colorado, the pink river dolphin, said to live in the longest, most powerful river system on Earth. In the telling Zevallos grew up with, the bufeo is not only an animal. It is a guardian that suddenly becomes a white man in a hat. This seducer takes women away and later returns them pregnant. A myth that feels ancestral and therefore unquestionable.

The trouble is that myths can be used like camouflage.

Zevallos, known as KAY, says the version passed down in many places has been distorted. She describes how girls grow up with the idea that the bufeo will seduce them, and how a child with slightly pinker skin can be labeled a son of the bufeo, a son of the foreigner. This phrase can soften what should be named plainly: violence, rape, coercion. She speaks from what she calls the urban and riverbank Amazon, where the river is not distant nature but a daily boundary and a daily invitation.

Her point is not to mock belief. It is to show how belief can be weaponized. She says the myth gets used to cover violence that comes from inside families, from the father, the uncle, someone close, someone who can hide behind a legend. In that telling, the bufeo becomes an alibi that communities learn to accept, because confronting the person everyone knows is easier than accepting it.

A grounded everyday observation sits under this. When a community repeats one explanation for harm, it becomes a shortcut. It becomes the story you reach for when the truth is too costly to say out loud. The shortcut spreads because it protects the powerful and burdens the vulnerable.

Rubber Boom Shadows in a Modern City

Zevallos traces the hat-wearing foreigner back to a specific historical weather system: the rubber boom. She says foreigners with hats began arriving in Amazonian towns, especially during that era, which began in 1879, and that they were bosses and landowners on estates where women were mistreated and enslaved.

Even when people do not explicitly recite that history, it sits within the myth like a stain that will not wash out. A white man appears from the river. He takes what he wants. The community explains it away as magic. What this does is keep colonial power alive in the imagination, long after the economic cycle that helped produce it.

Zevallos remembers being forbidden to bathe in the river, especially during menstruation. The warning was simple: if you go, the bufeo might come and kidnap you. She describes the fear of entering rivers as a kind of mutilation of water itself, because Amazonian life is connected to rivers at every level. A river is where you cool off, where you move, where you gather, where you learn your own geography. Fear cuts that connection.

Then she did something that reads like a small act until you picture it. She decided to confront the fear and stage a performance in the Itaya River in Iquitos during the days she was menstruating.

There is a sensory element that almost insists on being imagined. The river water presses against the skin. The humidity that clings. The way a current can feel gentle until it suddenly is not. The performance is not only a statement. It is a body choosing to enter a space that stories had claimed as forbidden.

From Individual Memories to Collective Proof

Zevallos says she spent years investigating what happened in her land since the rubber boom, and that the bibliography focuses heavily on the genocide of Indigenous peoples and on exploitation, but far less on violence against women. She talked with women close to her, including family, to understand how the myth reached them. She studied. She listened. She built the work slowly.

The wager here is that art can do what policy reports sometimes fail to do. It can make a community look at itself without immediately turning away.

In 2023, she presented a performance in Prague at the National Gallery called Sombra de las Amazonías, placing the bufeo legend at the center. She repeated that presentation months ago at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. The description of the 2023 show framed rubber as both source and engine of colonial expropriation and described pigmented natural rubber membranes, colored with achiote, as a nodal point where worlds meet: exploiter and native, human and amphibian, profane and sacred. The underwater cultural universe beneath the river was described as the bufeo’s world, the world of legend and its rewritings.

That language matters because it shows what Zevallos is doing. She is not only rejecting a myth; she is also challenging it. She is mapping how myths travel through materials, through labor, through colonial economies, and then into the stories people tell children at the river’s edge.

She also points to the present. She says Iquitos, where she grew up, has high rates of child sexual violence. A recent campaign by the United Nations Population Fund said sexual violence has marked generations in the Peruvian Amazon, and more than 1,800 cases are reported each year in Awajún communities.

Placed beside the bufeo story, those numbers stop being distant. They start to feel like the modern shape of an old wound.

Zevallos says her aim is to make individual memories visible collectively. Each performance, exhibition, or theater piece, she says, is built on deep research into violence against women in her land.

Her argument is precise: memory should be rescued, but not the distorted version. The goal is not to kill the myth, she says, but to demystify it, to return to the original myth, the one without the little hat and polished shoes. In the original, she insists, the bufeo is a guardian. It does not rape. It does not kidnap. It protects.

And she says she will not rest until girls stop loving the false bufeo, until these stories are cut off, until people can say plainly that the bufeo does not transform into a man.

In other words, until the river becomes a river again. Not a cover story. Not a threat. A place that belongs to those who live beside it.