The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture, Revised and Expanded Edition

The Riddle of Cantinflas

77 In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. —Raymond Chandler Culture in Mexico is governed by two opposing sides, sharply divided by an open wound: on the one hand, a highbrow, Europeanized elite dreams of inserting the nation’s creative talent into a global stream of artistic consciousness; on the other, native art, a hybrid that results from ancient and borrowed elements, is produced by and for the masses. High-brow: Frida Kahlo; the painters Rufino Tamayo, José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros; the globetrotting opera singer Plácido Domingo; even the Russian and Spanish filmmakers Sergei Einsenstein (¡Que viva México!) and Luis Buñuel (Los olvidados), who greatly influenced the nation’s self-understanding through powerful cinematic images. Lowbrow: the popular wrestler El Santo; the rancheramoviesof thethirtiesandfortieswithPedroInfante,JorgeNegrete, Blanca Estela Pavón, and Lupe Vélez; the archfamous children’s songwriter Francisco Gabilondo Soler, aka Cri-Cri; and the romantic balladist Juan Gabriel. Don’t worry if you’re unable to recognize the latter references: the nation’s cultural exports are invariably Westernized products, hardly any proletarian items. A common belief has it that lowbrow Mexican culture is kitschy. Nothing is further from the truth. The terms kitsch and camp, which Webster’sdictionarydefinesas“artworkcharacterizedbysentimental,often pretentious bad taste” and “something so outrageously artificial, affected, inappropriate,orout-of datetobeconsideredamusing,”don’tevenhavean THE RIDDLE OF C ANTINFL AS 78 THE RIDDLE OF C ANTINFL AS equivalent in Spanish; cursi, meaning parodic, self-referential, inbred with intentional exaggeration, or perhaps misrepresentation, of human feelings, is the closest in aesthetic terminology Spanish gets to them. But American icons like The Lawrence Welk Show, Barry Manilow, and the Bee Gees are cursi;nativeartinMexico,instead,isnothingbutrascuache,asouth-of-theborder colloquialism ignored by the Iberian standardizer, the Diccionario de la lengua española de la Real Academia, yet often used in Mexico to describe a cultural item of inferior quality and proletarian origin. Rascuache has no English cognate: the pachuco fashion style in Los Angeles, for example, was rascuache; the musician Agustín Lara; the porcelain replicas of smiling clowns and ballerinas known as Lladrós, sold at departmentstores;imitationsofYvesSt.LaurentandRalphLaurenclothing; T-shirts of the music group Menudo; and native sodas such as Chaparritas and flavored Tehuacán. Tamarind and coconut, in spite of their global recognition (or perhaps as a result of it), the novelistas Laura Esquivel, responsible for Like Water for Chocolate, and Paco Ignacio Taibo II, known for dirty-realistthrillersthathaveprivatedetectiveHéctorBelascoaránShayne as protagonist, are somewhat rascuache as well. While Mexico’s highbrow society uses and abuses the term in order to establish a distance, to distinguish itself from cheap, lowborn inventiveness, rascuachismo, with its trademark of authenticity, is also a source of pride and self-respect among thedispossessed.Itisappliedbythebourgeoisietoalguienmás—“someone else” judged to be outside the demarcations of approved taste and decorum ; to be rascuache is to be inferior, undeserving. But the lower classes assumeitsaestheticswithahappysmile:arascuacheitemistruly,unequivocally Mexican and therefore a magnet of self-satisfaction. Throughout the decades,rascuachismohasacquiredsomethinglikealogicof taste,aconsistent sensibility that can be crammed into the mold of a system. Avant-garde bourgeois art, even when addressing the most vulgar and tasteless, will by definition never descend to such low esteem. But the ruling class always maintains a kind of “negotiating relationship” with it; it uses it to establish a bridge across economic and social lines, to create an image of the nation’s collective psyche, and to benefit the tourist industry. As proven by the case of the early-twentieth-century engraver José GuadalupePosada,occasionallyaproletarianartistcanbe“saved”fromhis rascuache background through the help of enlightened, upper-class artists. Posada died poor and forgotten and was buried in an anonymous grave in 1913, as the Socialist revolution was sweeping the country. His lampoons ridiculed Porfirio Díaz’s dictatorship (1876–1911) and commemorated THE RIDDLE OF C ANTINFL AS 79 holidays and natural disasters. But he would have remained anonymous had Jean Charlot, a French immigrant to Mexico and a friend of muralists Rivera and Orozco, not shown Posada’s prints around and written about him in the context of the European style cubism. Charlot brought him to international attention, thus redeeming him from the imprisonment of rascuachismo and turned him into a veritable artifact of highbrow culture. In other cases, nonetheless, a rascuache artist will be used by the intelligentsia to promote a certain “official” vision of...