El derecho de responder: Reactions to Laura Gutierrez’s: “El derecho de re-hacer : Signifyin(g) Blackness in Contemporary Mexican Political Cabaret”

In her provocative essay “El derecho de re-hacer: Signifyin(g) Blackness in Contemporary Mexican Political Cabaret,” Laura G. Gutiérrez sketches out a genealogy of political cabaret in Mexico. Whereas in her important book Performing Mexicanidad, she looks at the ways in which gender and sexual identities get staged and choreographed in the cabaret of “classic” performers like Jesusa, Astrid Hadad, and Nao Bustamante, among others, this time she focuses on the difficult question of race—blackness to be specific—in the performance works of Las Reinas Chulas and Jesusa Rodríguez. I reference this question as “difficult,” precisely because for a long time in Mexico the questions of race and blackness have always been displaced. I am reminded of a scene in a Carlos Fuentes’s short story, “Las dos Elenas” in Cantar de ciegos, where after a heated Sunday-family-dinner conversation about blacks and racial tension in the U.S., the patriarch pronounces:

—Pues yo doy gracias de que aquí no haya negros – dice el padre de Elena al servirse la sopa de poro y papa que le ofrece, en una humeante sopera de porcelana, el mozo indígena que de día riega los jardines de la casota de las Lomas.

[“Well, I am thankful that here [in Mexico] there are no blacks,” says Elena’s father, as he pours himself some potato leek soup, offered to him in a steamy porcelain tureen by the Indian servant who by day waters the gardens of the big house in Las Lomas.]

This scene is quite telling because it shows the patriarch’s double blindness—on the one hand, he insists that “there are no blacks”; on the other hand, the Indian servant is rendered invisible as part of a palimpsest of objects: the porcelain tureen, the steam of potato leek soup, the gardens, the mansion in Las Lomas. In that microcosm of a well-to-do Mexican family, race and blackness are not necessarily part of its worldview—not a point of reference. Thus, it would almost appear that to render race and blackness visible in a Mexican social space cultural context requires a melodramatic (read: excessive) representation—a re-hacer melodrámatico, to echo Gutiérrez’s work—of the question of race.

How do performance artists make blackness matter in contemporary Mexican culture? To what end? As Gutiérrez argues, the black body has circulated in Mexican popular culture in a rather limited set of spaces—from Caignet’s El derecho de nacer and its frenzied proliferation in film and telenovelas, Gabilondo Soler’s lyrics “El negrito bailarín” and “Negrito sandía,” as well as melodramatic films like Angelitos negros and Flores blancas para mi hermana negra, and historietas. This limited representation of black bodies in popular culture, indeed, gives a very thwarted understanding of racial politics. Any emergence of a black body in the Mexican social and cultural context will necessarily appear as oversized. When the black body is cast in a melodramatic space, the possibilities for (mis)reading blackness grow exponentially and literally out of control. To recap, blackness has circulated in a limited sociocultural Mexican context. Whenever blackness is submitted to the space of melodrama, it is inevitably bound to appear monstrous. And, furthermore, when blackness is read from within Mexican hegemony, which often has no point of reference on questions of race, it is relegated to non-existence or invisibility. In other words, the representation of blackness in Mexico (and to varying degrees in other Latin American countries vis-à-vis the Caribbean) at this historical juncture can only cause unease. Now, if we consider that 2006 presentation of Noches árabes al pastor, performed by Jesusa and colleagues in Tepoztlán before an international audience whose racial politics and sensibilities are international as well, then it is not surprising that different, and even contentious, readings of the event occurred.

Gutiérrez proposes that Noches árabes al pastor is about “the ‘awkward’ relationship between Mexicans and their body...