José Limón and La Malinche: The Dancer and the Dance

INTRODUCTION: Jos

INTRODUCTION José Limón and La Malinche Patricia Seed During the 1950s and 1960s, one of the great Mexican American artists of the century traveled to more than a dozen countries in Europe and Latin America as a cultural ambassador of the United States. He trained a generation of students at New York’s famed Juilliard School in his technique, received two of the highest honors in his field, and created theatrical pieces that even today remain widely performed. Yet despite all these achievements, outside of a tightly knit community of artists few people know his name.1 José Acadio Limón (1908–1972) attained renown in a new twentiethcentury art form. Apprenticed to Charles Weidman and Doris Humphrey , two major figures in the second generation of the modern dance movement, Limón assumed his place as the lone Mexican American among an elite circle of twentieth-century modern dancers—a field whose founders were mainly female and included Isadora Duncan, Martha Graham, and Mary Wigman as well as the talented African American choreographers Pearl Primus and Katherine Dunham. While excellent studies of the early impact of female and African American choreographers on modern dance have appeared,2 relatively little has emerged on the distinctive impact of the first Mexican American dance composer.3 Born in Mexico to a middle-class family, Limón fled north with them to avoid the turmoil of the Revolution. Like many immigrants to this country, his family lost their financial security in the move north. In the northern Mexican province of Sinaloa, Limón’s father, Florencio, had directed the state band. But state governments in the United States do not hire full-time musicians, let alone musical directors. Rather, artists depend primarily on private philanthropy, occasionally supplemented by grants from government agencies. In the highly competitive world of U.S. orchestras, a musical director from a northern Mexican provincial  José Limón and La Malinche town did not have a chance of assuming a position of equivalent status. As a result, the family struggled to make ends meet as Florencio taught music to individual students, an uncertain living in the best of circumstances . Occasionally he played in small Mexican bands that performed on holidays and special occasions. José Limón’s economically insecure family moved first to Arizona and then to East Los Angeles in 1923, where they joined the swelling Mexican American community. While only a handful of immigrant families in East Los Angeles had started out, like the Limóns, in the middle class, economic prosperity eluded his family, as it did most others in the 1920s and 1930s. Los Angeles was not particularly welcoming to new Spanish-speaking arrivals. Viewed largely as a source of cheap labor by the ruling Anglo community, most newly arrived Mexicans and Mexican Americans struggled to eke out a living amid competition from workers from other ethnic communities—Filipino, Japanese, and African American— seeking similar jobs. But the larger numbers of Mexican Americans made them easier targets for antiforeign sentiment, feelings that were fueled by the declining number of jobs during the Depression. In 1931 the Immigration Service began large-scale roundups of hundreds of Mexican Americans, deporting them regardless of their immigration status. Over the next nine years an estimated forty thousand people, including many legal residents, were deported to Mexico. Even those who had entered the country legally had to spend years reestablishing their legal right to reside in Los Angeles.4 Life for Mexican Americans in 1920s and 1930s Los Angeles was, at the very least, precarious. Succeeding despite the double burdens of poverty and discrimination, José Limón graduated from high school. He studied art for a semester at the University of California, Los Angeles but abandoned college and headed east to establish a career as an artist. Initially he planned to paint, having demonstrated a talent for drawing from an early age. But after seeing El Greco’s masterpieces in New York, he despaired of making a career in art. A chance ticket to accompany a friend to a modern dance concert and an equally lucky visit to a modern dance classroom, however, showed Limón where his true vocation lay. From his very first lesson, he demonstrated a remarkable ability to use his body as a means of artistic expression. Only a year after having taken his first dance class, Limón was performing professionally. This feat alone is remarkable. Most people begin dance training when they are young...