JESUSA RODRÍGUEZ
Within the panorama of the Mexican capital's contemporary theater, Jesusa Rodríguez is probably one of the most original and controversial figures. Rodríguez and her partner, the singer/composer/pianist Liliana Felipe, founded an independent cabaret in Coyoacán called El Hábito. There, Rodríguez performed and directed more than 320 shows in ten years (1990-2000). El Habito is now under the administration of Las Reinas Chulas, a group of contentious young satirists devoted to cabaret, and Rodríguez is now dedicated to independent projects.
All cabaret works of Rodríguez and Felipe are an open debate about contemporary theatrical forms. This attitude is related to the extensive journey Rodríguez has undergone throughout her long career departing from traditional theater, opera, operetta and finally arriving to cabaret. Like Hadad, Rodríguez is deeply influenced by German cabaret and Mexican Teatro de carpa, both from the beginning of the century. For her, cabaret is a “mother” genre in which it is possible to make use of all theatrical models in which she has been involved. Rodríguez satirizes contemporary Mexican politicians such as presidents, secretaries of state, and prominent people of Mexican cultural life. She also parodies historical lesbian symbols such as Frida Khalo—Trece Señoritas (1983), and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz--Los Empeños de una casa (1992), Sor Juana en Almoloya: Pastorela Virtual (1995). In these particular cases Rodríguez has represented her version of Mexican history by revisiting and emphasizing the dissident sexualities of these women, who have been hidden or strategically forgotten by official culture. Rodriguez’ cabaret expropriates national icons, removing them from the net of codes and meanings from which Mexican history gets power to support its hegemonic symbolic structure.
From within the parameters of the cabaret genre, Jesusa Rodríguez continues the conjectural line of Teatro de Carpa and explores the realm of entertainment in order to build her political dissidence. One of these explorations has to do with her job outside the cabaret. Teatro de carpa was the theater of the underdogs of the ‘20s and ‘30s in Mexico City, which mixed circus spectacles, political satire and frivolous theater. In order to resuscitate this dynamic Rodríguez has worked in many popular theatrical activities, especially with pastorelas: a colonial mixture of religious teachings, Indigenous-Mexican folklore, and mostly vulgar comedy. Though they initially developed as part of a trans-cultured form of religious practice in the 16th century, pastorelas exist today either as an evolved popular practice or as a self-conscious postcolonial strategy of avant-garde artists such as Rodríguez. Traditionally the plot revolves around the pilgrimage of shepherds to Bethlehem to see the newborn Christ Child, although according to medieval tradition an evil spirit is one of the most important characters. The titles of some of her pastorelas give us an idea of Rodríguez’ subversive modifications: Narco-pastorela: el cartel de Belén (1990), El derecho de abortar (1999), Pastorela terrorista (2004). Rodríguez’ “outside” cabaret work accomplishes an important task as a popular provider of alternative and alterable interpretations of Colonial and present times. All Rodríguez work queers official discourse that holds colonial history frozen in time.
It is important to mention the Mexican comedy company La Chinga (1997) when studying Rodriguez’ theatrical work “outside” the cabaret. Consisting of different young actors from marginal areas of Mexico City who have been trained by Rodríguez’ cabaret and other artistic colleagues, the company has made presentations in public places such as squares, parks, and schools using archetypal popular characters taken from the streets. This project has generated similar enterprises, such as Prometeo (2000), with a more political aim. Prometeo was created in memory of the 45 victims of the massacre of Acteal who were assassinated by Mexican federal military forces, the government of Chiapas and PRI paramilitaries in 1997. Extending her work even farther, Rodríguez is frequently involved with confrontational street interventions, such as the time she fought against the construction of a commercial mall inside the Archeological Zone of Cuicuilco (1999). These ruins date back to 500 B.C., are the oldest large-scale construction in central Mexico still standing, and are now almost completely surrounded by new buildings due to the failure of the opposition’s conservation campaign. Yet another example of Rodríguez’ socio-political action was her opposition to the return of former president Salinas de Gortari, whom many believed was responsible for producing the contemporary economic crisis in Mexico. Rodriguez’ response was to lead a group of protesters, who screamed strong political slogans such as “Get out criminal Salinas,” “Salinas de Gortari: Drug Dealer-politician,” and wrote the word “KILLER” in red letters across the stone wall surrounding Salinas’ home.
One can see in these examples that Rodríguez believes cabaret to be a complex and intense political tool. Art and cabaret are for her inevitably linked to contemporary history. Rodríguez sees no separation between cabaret performance and street protest; both are crucial aspects to her work as an artist exploring the personal and public dramas of Mexican culture. From President Fox and his wife Marta Sahagún to Benito Juárez (Foximiliano y Martota-2003), almost all the icons of contemporary Mexican culture have been represented and recontextualized in Rodríguez’ factory of symbolic transformations. As a queer dramatic production, her work looks insistently for the fissures of the Mexican patriarchy, not only to mock and parody them, but also to appropriate their power of interpretation.
TITO VASCONCELOS
Tito Vasconcelos in La pasión según cabaretito. Foto de G. Alzate
As with Rodríguez and Paquita, Tito Vasconcelos is the owner of a cabaret, which he calls Cabaretito (which means “small cabaret” and is a combination of the word cabaret with his name, Tito). Through his work Vasconcelos has linked the canonic tradition (Greek Theater, Shakespeare, Dario Fo, Ibsen, and American Music Theater) with the Review Theater of the Mexican revolution. His cabaret is a balance between a theater/cultural genre known as Camp and Mexican Review Theater, focusing on the hyperbolic aspect of both genres. Whereas Revista exaggerates the archetypal characters of Mexico City, Camp exaggerates both queer aspects of lesbian and gay culture and also aspects of heterosexual gender construction. From Camp, Vasconcelos has taken a sense of superficiality that, in his cabaret, adopts the form of both a social and political criticism. Vasconcelos believes the intersection of these two seemingly incompatible cultural elements, “pop” culture and socio-politics, reveals Mexican life’s deepest conflict.
As a consequence of his complex approach, Vasconcelos’ cabaret demands constant metamorphosis. One can appreciate this metamorphosis in Mariposas y Maricosas (1984). Following the theatrical ideas of Charles Ludlam and his Theater of the Ridiculous, with whom Vasconcelos had studied in New York, Vasconcelos built a dramatic persona based on Chepina Peralta, a star of 1970s Mexican pop culture. In his representation of Peralta, Vasconcelos combined the Mexican Revista style, popular TV culture, Camp theater and political issues to produce one of his famous characters: Doctora Tatiana Ilhuicamina. Vasconcelos’ Doctora Tatiana was, unlike Peralta, a feminist cooking teacher and gay rights advocate. As Antonio Prieto asserts, with Vasconcelos’ Doctora Tatiana both satirized and subverted the way in which popular heterosexual culture uses folklore and female characters, converting them into official icons of a supposed Mexican nationality (“Camp, Carpa and Cross-dressing”). The result is a rigid, unchanging female identity that leaves no room for the progressive elements of contemporary Mexican culture. It is this petrification of female identity that, through his metamorphosis of popular female icons, Vasconcelos objects to. At the same time, Vasconcelos objects to the ways in which Mexican gay culture assumes onto gay identity the heterosexual feminine subjectivity embodied by female icons such as Peralta.
Unlike Rodríguez, whose sophisticated cabaret demands a high degree of political analysis from its audience, Vasconcelos is more interested in the popular roots of Revista. For this reason, although Vasconcelos and Rodríguez have worked together on projects such as La Chinga, Vasconcelos’ cabaret tends to be more closely related to popular culture and gay culture, exploring icons and topics from Mexican “B” movies, advertising, and TV programs. Sexo, pudor y aliens (1998) is a good example; the title is a parody of a popular Mexican drama and later a film called Sexo, pudor y lágrimas, which attempts to show—not very successfully—the existential tribulations of high-class, thirty-something couples in Mexico City.
As in the old Revista of the beginning of the century, in Cabaretito the actors are required to read newspapers and adapt their roles accordingly. An example of this type of cabaret is Los Ángeles de Chente (2001), which was created the same day as the inauguration of Vicente Fox as president of Mexico. During its first week running, the audience knew perfectly well the joking references being made to President Fox. In its second week, the topic of the president was losing interest, forcing the actors to move to other references such as the Zapatista movement, though they kept the structure of the original play. This dynamic implies a large investment of time and requires very skilled acting for improvisation, in which Vasconcelos is a maestro. This is also true for the new generation of actors and directors who are welcome to suggest any idea, topic, or play for his cabaret. Within the theatrical community, Vasconcelos is well known for his generosity and pedagogical skills.
One of Vasconcelos’ most interesting projects was his work in regard to pedagogy alongside senior students of the CUT (Centro Universitario de Teatro-University Center for Theater), with whom Vasconcelos created the play Shakespeare a la carta (1997). In this cabaret, the audience would choose a sketch according to a menu they received upon arrival at the theater. Vasconcelos and his students recreated most of the dynamics of the Comedia Dell’Arte, but they did so from the perspective of Mexico City’s gender and archetypal characters from Mexican lithography of the 19th century. As we can see from this example, Vasconcelos’ cabaret work is significant because of his postmodern translation of the old Musical Review Theater’s dynamics from the beginning of the century. His adaptation of canonical theater via gender issues and pop culture has produced one of the most critical yet hilarious Cabaret Theater shows in Contemporary Mexican history.
FRANCIS
Our fifth performance artist is firmly rooted in popular culture. Francis is a drag queen who has had a very long artistic career. She was initially an actor in films, soap operas, and plays, though she eventually became the owner of her own company of celebrity impersonators. Francis has toured in the most important cities in Mexico and has visited California and Texas with her show. She frequently performed in one of the most popular and traditional theaters in the history of Mexico City: La Blanquita. The audience of this theatre is made up mostly of married or engaged lower class couples, a group which does not represent the demographic that usually attends transvestite shows. The popular acceptance of Francis' show is astonishing because homophobia is a common characteristic of Mexican culture. As with Juan Gabriel, a very popular gay singer whom today is a national icon, Francis portrays an explicit queerness that is striving for validity. The marginality of Francis' drag queen performance in the context of the performing arts is more critical than the other artists analyzed in this article because, in spite of her popularity, there is no mention of her company in any cultural magazines except for those advertisements paid for by her manager. If Paquita is a charismatic Other, discussed by feminists, artists, politicians, housewives and the general public, then Francis is an offensive Other whom many go to see perform but few are willing to talk about.
In Francis’ cabaret it is never clear when she is engaging in a characterization of her sexual subjectivity and when it is a matter of her performance personae. Francis confronts her audience in a vulgar manner. Continuing the tradition of the most popular albureros, Francis' show is based on nationalist and politically incorrect jokes. Theatrically speaking, this confrontation allows Francis to gain power through the intimidation of the audience by manipulating their homophobic fears. This can be seen in her comments to male spectators such as: “Have you not seen a fag before? Come on, come on, smile, and enjoy yourself.” Besides this unexpected and rude behavior with the audience, Francis also has a quasi-fascist, conservative ideology that easily irritates almost all Mexican intellectuals, gay or not. Francis is particularly known for her hostility and criticism towards political associations that deal with gay issues. The result has been a very modest appreciation of her show among progressive gay circles in Mexico throughout the last 20 years. Nevertheless, the more Francis’ show loses its approval by the leftist or non-repressive perspective, the more popular she becomes within the official Review Theater genre, which tends to support conservative agendas such as anti-gay legislation.
Due to Francis’ genuine efforts to make her drag queen show visible and because the mainstream culture is unable to repress it in absolute terms, she has been able to negotiate a justifiable social space for herself and her performance. Nevertheless, Francis has had to change parts of her original transvestite show that were exclusionary of the heterosexual lifestyle. She did this to include her heterosexual audience, thereby maintaining her negotiated social performance space. However, large parts of the original show remain, such as Francis’ subversive challenge to the field of macho symbolic representation. Francis often does this by making jokes, which assume her male audience has previously had homosexual experiences:
Ladies, do not get scared. My queens, beside my “big” words and dirty stories, what I am going to tell you is that there is nothing different or new here. And you, male soap opera stars, you calm down too. Relax babies, especially those of you in front of me. Maybe because you see that I have already begun to fuck some of you that are in the first row, you wet your pants and you are thinking: “what is this whore going to tell me now.” Do not worry; I am not going to do anything you have not done before (García Escalante).
This strategy allows Francis to emphasize what, in her eyes, is a double standard. Her dramatic production points to how Mexican homophobic homosocialism may mask routine homoerotic practices. In this Mexican male scenario, homosocialism is very public: the cantina, the soccer field, the professional organization (e.g., army), the workplace, the privileged masculine space created at any social event. Homosocialism is primarily homophobic—or at least, speaks implicitly a discourse of homophobia—although it may shade off into private practices of homoeroticism: two men in the public space of the cantina get “homosocially” drunk and then in the private space of the bathroom or a hotel engage in homoerotic practices (Lumsden, Nuñez Noriega).
It is this sort of gender dynamics within Mexican culture that Francis wishes to call attention to and question. As a transvestite, Francis is able to take advantage of her position within the system of gender duality to strategically portray herself as sometimes a man and sometimes a woman in her cabaret jokes. On the cabaret stage, this switches between her masculine and feminine roles, producing an alteration in the symbolic position of the passive homosexual within Mexican culture. As Francis herself has explained, were she merely “gay” she would not succeed as a performer. Francis has taken the flamboyant and rebellious social imaginary of the transvestite from within her culture and has manipulated it to develop a theatrical persona. This strategy of producing visibility inside the Mexican Review Theater genre is very significant when one takes into account the stigmatization of femininity as something invisible, weak, and fragile. Francis also uses this flashy transvestite dynamic to gain a voice; in doing so, she erupts into the masculine sphere.
Francis’ cabaret is a clearly queer scene in which heterosexual men can be in contact, theatrically speaking, with a feminine homosexual transvestite. In this way, what Francis achieves is paradoxical. On the one hand she reinforces the patriarchy underlining her jokes about gay stereotypes and misogynist views of women, and on the other hand she symbolically liberates the ambiguous, masculine homophobia that underlines the obsolete, normative categories of sexual differences. She also denounces the energies devoted toward the legitimacy of male bisexuality inside Mexican culture.
CONCLUSION
Las Reinas Chulas, a group of contentious young satirists devoted to cabaret. Foto de G. Alzate
The main characteristic of Mexican cabaret, when compared to other theatrical genres, is its particular dedication to the immediate present. Each of the Mexican artists studied here dedicates her or his artwork to this immediacy. Cabaret is the theatre of great fallacies, dreams, and collective disappointments. It is the ontology of the immediate social and political present. Nevertheless, many consider the cabaret a “minor” theatrical genre. Therefore, one of our purposes in this essay is to argue the legitimacy of its emergence and integration into genuine postmodern Latin American culture. In doing so, we are not interested in erasing the stigma of cabaret’s position as an outsider. To the contrary, we wish to show that its main cultural energy, which is spent on producing new codes and rejuvenating old ones, comes precisely from its marginality from both the mainstream media and institutionalized theater. It is from its non-conformist understanding of culture that cabaret scrutinizes the hybridized political and sexual web of signs that builds the postmodern Mexican reality.
Hybridization is becoming one of the most influential processes in our globalized world. “Metropolis” and “Borders” are two of the spaces in which hybridization processes are most intense (García Canclini, 1998). Mexico City qualifies as both a metropolitan area and a border region; it is one of the largest cities in the world, and its global media culture generously blends with its popular and indigenous cultures and languages. The deterritorialization that is produced as a result has found its theatrical homeland in the hyper dramatic narrative of cabaret. Hadad, Paquita, Rodríguez, Vasconcelos, and Francis have rehabilitated their bodies as reterritorialized and hybrid scenic stages. Their particular focalization on the human physical self should be understood as a response to the progressive devaluation of more traditional forms of language. The present-day skepticism of traditional language in Mexican culture has produced a rift within the patriarchal theatrical community. Cabaret is a sign of this cultural fissure which process of emergence started in the 1980s and led to the genre’s legitimacy near the end of the 1990s. This process is unfinished, however, due to the queer, nonconformist and insubordinate nature of cabaret.
The devaluation of language is an issue not confined to Mexico and Latin America; it is part of a wider movement within Western theater that does not trust traditional canonical text as a faithful vehicle of expression of the contemporary human condition (Brecht, Ionesco, Artaud). This process, which occurs within popular culture and theater, also initiates complex manifestations such as Paquita’s refusal to introduce her songs or talk to the audience during her show. Nevertheless, this devaluation also has multifaceted implications that become clear when one studies Hadad’s baroque carnality, Vasconcelos’ Camp/Revista Theater, and Jesusa’s political Cabaret. Because such Cabaret performers feel that contemporary theater’s tools are not sufficient for expressing postmodern reality, they find their identities in the heritage of popular culture by revisiting the Teatro de Carpa and Musical Review Theater.
All the performers analyzed in this paper use their bodies and words as tools to showcase the tension within the social order. Consciously or unconsciously, all of them have faith in the contemporary Western theatrical belief of creating theater that serves one’s own truth. Hadad, Rodríguez, and Vasconcelos recreate lesbian and gay bodies through combining the influences of underground Mexican tradition and Western culture; they do this as a way to question the official construction of gender, politics, and history. In the case of Paquita, this truth is related to the creation of a dissident space within Mexican popular love songs. Paquita represents a viable alternative role for women in popular culture, far from the stereotypically beautiful, submissive, and seductive female singers who abound in the Mexican mass media. By using techniques such as the naturalization of the transvestite body, Francis also incarnates a degree of interrogation of Mexican bisexual masculinity. As such examples illustrate, these artists’ productions are expressions of the wide range of sexual representations a city as diverse and complex as Mexico City offers. Additionally, the diversity of their performances provides proof of the essentially hybrid and queer soul of the Mexican culture as a whole. Mexican cabaret as a dramatic text of the culture puts in crisis the traditional collective models of symbolization. Simultaneously, its unique position allows cabaret to propose alternatives to the uniform cultural production of subjectivities. In doing so, they call attention to the fragmentation and multiplicity of our reality, and especially to the need for non-dogmatic and queer perceptions of it.
* Francis died on October 10, 2007, after this article was written.
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