Re-haciendo el dolor del racismo: Queer Performativity and Audience Reception in Tepoztlán and Mexico City

Laura G. Gutiérrez’s suggestive essay “El derecho de rehacer: Signifyin(g) Blackness in Contemporary Mexican Political Cabaret” is an open invitation to dialogue—an entreat to a painful conversation about legacies of racism—and an exploration about the constructive discomfort provoked by contemporary political cabaret performance in Mexico. Gutiérrez explores a series of controversial performances by Jesusa Rodríguez, Liliana Felipe, Tito Vasconcelos and Las Reinas Chulas that engage in a citational referencing of earlier, twentieth-century representations of blacks in Mexico. She clearly positions herself as a U.S.-based scholar engaging with these works, at times with other U.S.-based scholars who see these portrayals as uncritical reiterations of racist stereotypes. Gutiérrez offers a historical approach to try to contextualize the specificity of the representations and understand what is getting lost in translation. She complements her analysis (and facilitates our own understanding of her scholarship) through her guerrilla-style documentary videography, offering self-recorded clips of at least one performance on YouTube.

What is at stake when ostensibly white or mestizo Mexican (and in one case, Argentinean) performers, mostly queer, perform race for Mexican and visiting queer and straight academic U.S. and Puerto Rican audiences in Mexico? How do U.S.-based social and political conventions against the use of blackface and of stereotypes translate and move across borders? Several simple questions are at the heart of Gutiérrez’s essay: are these queer Mexican political cabaret artists racist? Are they simply unable to understand the legacy of anti-Black prejudice? Are they unintentionally perpetuating oppressive practices?

Gutiérrez invites us to question facile assumptions, dwelling in the space of discomfort, challenging her professional peers (many of them dedicated scholars that participate in the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History of the Americas) to examine our assumptions. Her careful elaboration on the transnational circuits of melodrama, which crosses the Caribbean from San Juan, Santiago, and Havana to Mexico, is one fortuitous route. Her historization of specific cultural phenomena such as Memín Pingüín and Cri Cri’s (Francisco Gabilondo Soler’s) song “Negrito Bailarín” is another.

I can suggest two additional strategies: one would be further historical referencing, for example through the work of scholars such as Ben Vinson III and Bobby Vaughn, whose path-breaking publications such as Afroméxico (2004) have helped to radically transform people’s understandings of the centrality of black lives and culture south of the Río Bravo. The second (greatly facilitated by Gutiérrez) entails an act of audience generosity and restraint: a willingness to engage in the necessarily complex emotional and intellectual effort in order to try to understand what is going on. Viewing YouTube videos of Noches árabes al pastor and Petróleo en la sangre is quite painful, and rightfully so: racism is painful. It is precisely a sign of the artists’ talent that they are able to cause this discomfort in their audiences. The decapitation of a black doll and casual invitation to communally drink from its liquid contents is a horrific act, and it is not surprising that it was only the performers and the children in the audience who partook of its contents. Las Reinas Chulas’s reenactment of Angelitos negros is quite violent, and the black daughter’s questioning of her white mother’s racism is quite transparent. These artists’ gleeful use of stereotype, comedy, and violence to question and challenge preconceived notions is a risky but powerful strategy that upsets our expectations for realist, transparent denunciation. In Mexico, audiences have to work to really see what is going on. Gutiérrez shows us one possible way.