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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

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Holy terrors: Latin American women perform

Diana Taylor

a b

& Roselyn Costantino

Professor and Chair of Performance Studies , NYU

Director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics

Associate Professor of Spanish and Women's Studies , Penn State University

Published online: 03 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Diana Taylor & Roselyn Costantino (2000) Holy terrors: Latin American women perform, Women &
Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 11:2, 7-24, DOI: 10.1080/07407700008571329
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07407700008571329

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INTRODUCTION
HOLY TERRORS:
LATIN AMERICAN WOMEN PERFORM
Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino

his volume brings together a divergent group of women

artists involved in some of the most important aesthetic and
political movements of Latin America.1 In one sense, these
women don't have a lot in common: Diana Raznovich (1945), a feminist playwright and cartoonist from Argentina, descended from
Russian Jews who fled the pogroms at the turn of the 19 century
and boarded the wrong boat (they thought they were going to the
United States). Griselda Gambaro (1928), Argentina's most widely
recognized playwright, is of Italian origin. Denise Stoklos (1950),
author, director, and Brazil's most important solo performer, comes
from the south of Brazil, and is of Ukrainian extraction. Astrid
Hadad (1957), performer, singer, director, and manager of her show,
born in the southern Mexican state of Quintana Roo, is of Lebanese
heritage. Jesusa Rodriguez (1955), director, actor, playwright,
scenographer, entrepreneur, and feminist activist, is of Mexican
indigenous and European ancestry. Sabina Berman (1955), playwright, director, poet, novelist, and film scriptwriter), is of Polish
Jewish extraction. El teatro de la mascara (the Theatre of the Mask),
Women (S Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Issue 22,11:2
2000 Women & Performance Project, Inc.

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8 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE

a woman's collective from Cali, Colombia, which started in the early
1970s, includes women of diverse ethnic origins. Tania Brugera
(1968) is a Cuban performer who explores the long history of extermination and political repression through her work.
These backgrounds attest to the racial and ethnic diversity of
Latin America, and make visible a complicated history of Spanish
and Portuguese colonialization, mestizaje, slavery, migration, U.S.
imperialism, and political exile. There are many reasonscultural,
economic, political, militarywhy these women are "Latin American." All of themwhether from the highlands of Chiapas or the
far reaches of Europeundergo profound processes of identity
(re)formation by participating in the "imagined community" of
Latin America. For some, the process began hundreds of years ago
when pre-Conquest ethnic identities came into uneasy contact with
European colonial systems. Colonialism and 19* and 20 t n century
nationalism have tried to erase all ethnic categories and relegate
"Indians," as an undifferentiated mass of marginalized peoples, to
a forgotten past. Authors and activists fight to give native peoples
their rightful place in the here and now of a heterogeneous "Latin
America." For groups whose population spreads out over different
countries, ethnic identity does not necessarily dovetail with national
identity. Tania Brugera, to posit a radically different example of the
same phenomenon, envisions a "greater Cuba" that spans both sides
of the Caribbean ocean. For Puerto Ricans, the struggle has been to
define themselves as "Puerto Rican" and, by extension, Latin American, rather than accept a colonial status as a second-class citizen of
the United States.2 Puerto Ricans, who endure the ambiguous status
of U.S. colonial subjects, are often missing from the Latin American political and geographic map. For others, the identification with
Latin America involved exile and migration from the poverty or
terrors of their countries of origins. For each, "Latin American"
proves more a negotiated political, ethnic, and cultural positioning
than a genetic or racial identitythat is, a political, rather than biological, matrix.
For each, moreover, "Latin America" proves quite differentfor
some, it consists of huge metropolitan centers like Mexico City, Sao
Paulo or Buenos Aires. For others, it's the indigenous communities
in the highlands of Chiapas or the Andes. If the differences and
divergences prove so great, and if the term "Latin America" does
not have a clear explanatory power, to what degree does the term
provide a useful framework for discussion?

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INTRODUCTIONS
"Amerique Latine," like "America," are European constructionsthe first coined in mid-191" century France to refer to countries in the Americas colonized by Spain and Portugal, the second
in honor of Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, who first argued that
the newly "discovered" Iandmass was not, in fact, Asia. There is no
general consensus about how many countries make up Latin
America: does Puerto Rico count as a country or as a U.S. "commonwealth"? Does the term include French speaking countries such
as Haiti and Martinique (usually), or English-speaking or Dutchspeaking countries such as Trinidad or Surinam (often not)?
Nonetheless, for all the problems with the term, it does have some
virtues for Latin Americans themselves. In the 19 tn century, Simon
Bolivar labored to unite Latin America under one political banner,
convinced that only by uniting could these countries defend themselves from external political and economic pressures. At the end of
the 19 l " century, Jose Marti wrote "Nuestra America" (Our
America) to urge Latin Americans to wake up and get to know each
other before the giant from the North with the big boots crashed
down among them. The current economic treaty among nations in
the southern cone, MERCOSUR, basically echoes the belief that
political and economic independence lies in unity.
For all the disparities of ethnic background, class, and racial privilege, these women share certain histories of social engagement that
allow us to think about them as "Latin American" artists. If geopolitical identity has less to do with "essence" than with conditions of
(im)possibility, then it becomes easier to see how these artists tackle
systems of power that date back to colonial times: Church domination, political oligarchy and dictatorship, and the pervasive sexism
and racism encoded in everything from education to "scientific"
eugenics efforts, to theories of mestizaje and progress. Each, in her
own way, uses performance as a means of making a political intervention in a socio-political context that is repressive when not
overtly violent. Some make their political intervention through
writingwhether it's a manifesto, a cartoon, or a play. Others participate in embodied performances that signal a break from accepted
practice by forming a feminist collective, building an installation,
or abandoning one's traditional dress.
These artists have grown up and worked in periods of extreme
social disruptionwhether it was Argentina's "Dirty War" (197683), or the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1984), or the
decades of civil conflict and criminal violence in Colombia, or the

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10 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE

divided Cuba that resulted from Castro's revolution, or the 1968
massacre atTlatelolco and the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City.
While female artists and activists have played a pivotal role in
human rights and social justice movements in Latin Americawe
need only think of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo or Rigoberta
Menchiithe very limited conditions of possibility for women have
dictated that their strategies of intervention were always predetermined by their sex. The Mothers could only intervene as mothers
(see Taylor 1997). Rigoberta Menchu insists in her writings that she
wielded the same power and authority as her male counterparts, only
to reveal again and again that she was able to gain authority in spite
of the fact that she is a woman. Female activists had to fight not only
the "enemy" but the men in their movements as well. Diana
Raznovich (like many artists) returned to Argentina from selfimposed exile to participate in the Teatro abierto movement. Teatro
abierto brought together hundreds of artists who had been blacklisted during the military dictatorship to stage a repertoire of 21
short plays in defiance of the governmental prohibition. Still, even
within this "open" liberatory movement, Diana Raznovich was
chided for being "frivolous." How could her play, El desconcierto,
which depicted a female pianist who tried in vain to wrestle sound
out of a silent piano, have anything to say about the culture of silencing associated with the "Dirty War?" She was asked by her male colleagues to withdraw her contribution to the event. Denise Stoklos,
though a highly acclaimed and paid artist, works at the periphery of
the theatrical establishment. Her solo performances and authored
texts get little more than a passing reference in histories and
overviews of contemporary Brazilian theatre. Astrid Hadad has generated such controversy and disdain from the establishment that
some male practitioners threatened to withdraw from events that
feature her work. El teatro de la mascara in Colombia has been in
existence longer than most collective theatre groups. Nonetheless,
it remains virtually unknown because, the members claim, people
simply don't care about "women's issues." Jesusa Rodriguez, a legendary artist in Mexico's artistic and intellectual communities, survives on their margins. And so it goes for most of these women.
For these women artists, then, political intervention (in the broadest sense) takes on many forms and many fronts including national
and ethnic political movements, human rights activism, and struggles around issues of gender, sexual, and racial equality. Often, in
these struggles, they come up against the Catholic Church. Since

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INTRODUCTION 11
the implementation of the "Holy Inquisition" in the 16*" century,
the Catholic Church has sided with civil authorities in the repression of disenfranchized groupsJews, native Americans, African
Americans, and, of course, women. During the "Dirty War,"
Catholic priests blessed the military's weapons with holy water and
turned in "subversives" who revealed their dissidence during confession. The Church continues to meddle with issues pertaining to
women. The Vatican has ruled against birth control, divorce, and
equal opportunity and access for women in a number of areas. It
opposed the Platform for Equal Rights for Women presented at 1995
Fourth World Conference on Women at Beijing and has continued
to try to dismantle the gains made in the fields of reproductive rights,
civil liberties, and education. As women working in deeply
entrenched Catholic societies, these women have become "holy
terrors," taking on not only the authorities, but the systems of belief
that demand that they behave like obedient, subservient creatures.
These artists need to work on many levels simultaneously in their
fight for cultural participation: access to space, to resources, to
authority, and to audienceslocal, national, and international. Most
of these artists have forged their own spacephysical and/or professionalto stage their aesthetic and political acts of resistance.
Some clearly needed to find their own ways of working, having been
closed out or pushed out of existing groups or organizations.
Jesusa Rodriguez and her partner Liliana Felipe, an Argentine
musician, singer and performer started their first cabaret/performance space, El cuervo (the Crow), in 1980 and then El habito (the
Habit) cabaret and El Teatro de la Capilla (the Chapel Theatre) in
1990. Rodriguez, like Astrid Hadad, began training at the Center for
University Theatre of Mexico's National Autonomous University
one of Latin America's major centers for the production and promotion of world-class theatre. Like Hadad, she was repulsed by the
male-run and artistically-limited and limiting nature of Mexico's
theatre and cultural institutions. Both left before finishing the
program and moved into the margins to work independently. (As an
a aside, to explain how women were treated by the male directors,
all well known and still active today, both Rodriguez and Hadad
recount mean-spirited comments hurled at them: Hadad was told
she was wasting her talent by pursing her style of performance which
wasn't theatre at all, and Rodriguez was told she had no right to be
onstage because she was too ugly.)

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12 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE

At El habito, the audience of lefties, gays, lesbians, and intellectuals can always expect to find new political satires and other kinds
of outrageous performances by Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana Felipe.
Irreverent and audacious, Jesusa and Liliana incorporate current
news and scandals into their brilliant skitsSalinas de Gortari,
Ernesto Zedillo and other
Mexican presidents make their
appearance, as do Bill Clinton,
Monica Lewinsky, Hitler, Sor
Juana Ines de la Cruz, Jesus
Christ, and the singer Madonna,
to mention just a few of the hundreds of famous personages to
take shape on their stage. Sometimes, the "real" politicians
themselves come to the cabaret
to see what's being said about
them. El habito also offers a full
schedule of guest appearances by
famous performers, and music
Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana
and performance workshops for
Felipe in El cielo de abajo
a wide audience. El Teatro de la
Capilla usually features full-length plays.
El teatro de la mascara has also founded its own space in which
to workassuring the women access to a performance space and
the development of their own audience. Nonetheless, the group
undergoes constant transformation as members come and go in their
efforts to earn a living.
But even artists who don't control their own physical space have
found ways of controlling their interventions. Astrid Hadad, who
always performs with Los tarzanes (the Tarzans, her largely female
band), has worked hard to develop her own circuit of festivals and
national and international performance opportunities. Denise
Stoklos, a solo performer who writes and directs her own productions, has done likewise, managing herself and publishing her own
books. Sabina Berman, a self-employed playwright, has created a
space for herself within the Mexican theatre establishment. Having
won recognition as one of the foremost Mexican dramatists, she now
enjoys a visibility and status both nationally and internationally, and
serves as a member of the board of the writer's union, SOGEM.

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INTRODUCTION 13
Diana Raznovich, as a dramatist
and cartoonist, works mostly by
herself in Buenos Aires, though
she too serves on the board of
Argentina's writer's union
Argentores. Griselda Gambaro
has gained major recognition
and is consistently produced in
Argentina's most prestigious
theatres. But for all her success,
she has until recently been the
sole woman to be included in
any project. Hers is usually the
only female name in Latin
American theatre festivals and
anthologies. It's been hard and
Griselda Gambaro's
it's been lonely, she admits with
Antigona Furiosa
her usual love of understatement.
While their artistic goals, media, and strategies varyone thing
remains constant: these women unsettle. Through their use of
humor, irony, parody, citationality, inversions and diversions, their
art complicates and upsets all the dogmas and convictions that dominant audiences hold near and dear. This is the art of the "outside."
These artists, holy terrors, take on the sacred cows. They fight for
the freedom to act up, act out, and call the shots. Denise Stoklos
rails openly against those whom she feels participate in the continuing travesty of Brazilian politics. Sometimes with humor, sometimes with raw indignation, she makes sure she
gets her views across. In
500 years: A Fax from
Denise Stoklos to Columbus, she explores the
role of the artist, the
intellectual, the theatre,
and the audience in the
tragic history of her
. , , .
..
.
,
country. "Read it," she
Denise Stoklos mCasa rails against the
,. ..,
,, ' .,
s ys
travesty of Brazilian politics
* :
" * *" m 'Je
7
books. Later, once the

14 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE

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audience fully comprehends the magnitude of her critique, she has

the house lights turned up: "The doors of the theatre are open for
those who want to abandon this ship in flames" (Stoklos 1992,
author's translation). Diana Raznovich uses the "minor" mode
the cartoonas well as her "frivolous" theatre to call attention to
the acts of everyday violence that women endure through socialization. Women are not allowed to laugh, to giggle or snigger, to
chuckle or cackle, to grin or guffaw. Women's right to pleasure is no
laughing matter, according to those who would advocate the position that "women should not laugh, it threatens the world with total
moral decomposition" (Manifesto 2000 of Feminine Humor). Women

should stifle their laughter, swallow it, block it, turn it into a cry, a
perpetual and dismal "ay ay ay." Jesusa Rodriguez and Liliana Felipe
likewise turn their formidable talents to making fun of repressive
social systems and the audience's complicity with them. And after
a night of political satire, non-stop directas e indirectas, they remind
their audience: "Seremos cabronas, pero somos las patronas." This
is their space, their art,
their turn, and they
have no intention of
giving it up.
The artists, though
committed to the disruption of oppressive
norms, share no ideological or political posi-

(Jesusa
Rodriguez,
T-ix? ir\>

_.
_
. ,, .
_ .
Diana Raznovichs\nner Gardens

Liliana relrpe, Diana

Raznovich), while others (like Denise Stoklos) might say they are
fighting all pervasive forms of oppression. Sabina Berman, while
working in and forming part of Mexico's male-controlled theatre
establishment, has forcefully introduced issues of gender and sexuality. She openly writes about lesbianism in a country where the
topic remains taboo. Moreover, she takes on the politicians directly.
Her play, Krisis, boldly reveals the true story of ex-President Salinas
de Gotari, who as a child murdered his nanny during a game. Her
critique is no less powerful for coming from the "inside." Other
artists see the answer to their marginalization in "collective" work
associated with 1960s socialist collectivessuch as El teatro de la

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INTRODUCTION 15
mascara. For others, like Stoklos,
solo performance allows them to
carry on the politics of the one.
Even so, "solo" doesn't mean
"alone." Stoklos, for example, is
always in conversation, artistically
and ideologically, with others who
have fought for freedom. Her last
words to the late Brazilian singer
Elis Regina, in her one-woman
homage by that name, maps out the
trajectory of solidarityStoklos
quotes Regina who in turn sings
one of Mercedes Sosa's most
famous lines, "Yo tengo tantos hermanos que no los puedo contar...."
Teatro La Mascara in their
(I have so many brothers/sisters
that I can't count them all). Astrid 1995 production A Flor de Piel
Hadad, even though accompanied by her musicians, is very much a
"solo" actcombining her songs (well-known boleros, rancheras,
tnariachi pieces, and other Mexican and Latin American forms) with
performances that call attention to the way these popular forms
encapsulate and transmit violent cultural fantasies. She, like many
of these artists, takes on the Catholic Church, the State and its
authorities; the reigning norms of taste and value; and any and all
certainties pertaining to appropriate gender and sexual roles.
These artiststhough courageous and transgressive in a number
of unexpected waysnonetheless belong to a tradition of outspoken women performers and artists. Their performances (as suggested above) pay tribute to, and often "cite," the paths of trailblazers in various arts in the 20 t n century throughout Latin
America: Mercedes Sosa, Elis Regina, La Lupe, Chabuca Granda,
Frida Kahlo, Lucha Reyes, Chavela Vargas, Rosario Castellanos and
Alfonsina Storni, to name a few.3 These earlier artists had already
challenged the limits and restrictions imposed on them by the racist,
misogynist, and homophobic world in which they worked. Singers
like the puertoriquena La Lupe had defiantly answered her male,
homophobic critics in her songs: "According to your point of view/
I am the bad one," while Chavela Vargas was notorious in Mexico
for picking up female admirers in the clubs and singing her love
songs exclusively to women. Chabuca Granda, from Peru, has re-

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16 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE

worked the famous song "Adelita" to question the quietism of contemporary women: "iDonde estas, Adelita? ^Donde estas, guerrillera?" (Where are you, Adelita? Where have you gone, woman
warrior?).
In addition to citing some of the great women performers of the
mid 20 century, these recent performers also draw liberally from
popular theatre styles of the late 19 and early 20" 1 century known
as teatro frivolo or frivolous theatre. These traditions have served
not only the "frivolous" artistssuch as Diana Raznovich, Astrid
Hadad, and Jesusa Rodriguezbut the more "serious" ones as well.
Sabina Berman's plays, for example, look like traditional Western
theatre. But a study of the content and tone of her work reveals nontraditional treatment of a broad spectrum of "universal" and
Mexican themes. In some of her plays we find elements of street
theatre, indigenous theatre based on oral tradition, and soap-opera
melodrama, an important part of Mexico's cultural production and
consumption and, these artists and many others laughingly admit,
a part of Mexico's national character as well.
Teatro frivolo is important to our study not only because of its
popularity among the women studied here but because of the resurgence of interest in its forms on the part of new generations of practitioners. Artists then and now, liberated from state-controlled
spaces and academic rules of production, take advantage of the
various forms and styles of teatro frivolo such as cabaret, sketchs,
teatro de revista (revue), teatro de carpa (itinerant theatre, literally,
under a tent), and street theatre. According to Pablo Duefias and
Jesus Escalante, the term teatro de revista referred to the genre whose
particular characteristic consisted of bringing to the stage a series
of satirical dramatizations, about one hour in duration, based on real
events, actual or past (12). The tone was generally comical and the
form parodiccharacteristics of other popular genres circulating
at the time such as the Spanish zarzuela and sainete, although with
specific variations, particularly in the content of the plot. Revista
incorporated music and dance scenes. Like the zarzuela (consisting
of one to four acts) and sainete (usually one act), revista served as
portraits of customs, fashions, and traditions. Sketchs (so called
because of the outline-form the open-ended scripts took) and carpa
(theatre staged under tents that traveled throughout the Mexican
Republic, along the lines of its distant cousin the circo criollo in
Argentina) are characterized by the open participation of the spectator as an integral part of the show. Similar to revista, the parody,

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INTRODUCTION 11
satire, and humor of the sketchs and carpa provided ample opportunity for artists and citizens to express themselves and their criticism
of all aspects of lifepolitical, economic, social, and cultural.
In this way, from the 1880s until the 1930s, people from all over
Latin America, from all social classes of the growing urban population and the provinces, mingled and participated in the ritual of
some local version oiteatrofrivolo. Writers drew their material from
daily events in the cities and throughout the provinces. Theatre and
song transmitted news and information, voiced sociopolitical criticism, and created a sense of nationhood, of national identity. Realistic and symbolic charactersincluding the street vagrant, the revolutionary, fancy cowboys, the innocent virgin, the prostitute, the
rancher, students, dancing skeletons, politicians, the cabaret diva,
and the drunkwere constructed through iconic gestures and
spoken through popular language characterized by the use ofalbures
and lunfardo, plays on words and puns with double meanings, often
with sexual connotations. Highlighted are the rich oral traditions of
popular classes imbued with an agile sense of humor and the use of
language that produces some of the most fascinating linguistic play
in the Spanish language (which also makes the translation of some
of this work difficult). This oral tradition also surfaces in the lyrics
of songs (boleros, corridas ranchera, tango, musica romdntica) which

are found at the center of popular culture, an integral part of

popular theatre.
Thus, all of these elements converged and helped crystallize the
images that audiences of these teatros had of themselves as a people.
Benedict Anderson's concept of "imagined community" works well
to describe the processes through which a geographically dispersed
and largely illiterate, heterogeneous population begins to conceive
of itself as a communitybut here it was predominantly through
performed, rather than print, culture. The representation of the elements and characters of the daily life of common people or pueblo
(the "popular" nature of the revista and these other theatrical
genres) acts as a catalyst to the emergence of the concept of local,
and even national, identities. This occurs in spite of the disdain of
the producers of elite forms, prominent men often caricatured and
criticized on revista's stages, who resignify the term "popular" to
correspond to an idea of masses, of the plebe, as vulgar.
The critics seemed to have little effect on the popularity, across
social and economic classes, of revista, carpa, and cabaret. The tight
relationship between these styles of theatre and the collective imag-

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18 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE

inary, between the producers of theatre, the public, and the
product/production, created truly "public" spaces which developed
in individuals a sense of belonging and of empowerment as they saw
themselves and their cosmovision represented on stage. Unlike classic
theatre, which comprises the largest part of most histories of theatre,
these popular forms were generated by the need for representation
and expression of the population whose tastes and realities they
reflected. Nonetheless, teatro frivolo began to fade into the background in the late 1920s and earlyl930s due to cultural trends
gaining currency in the various countries: the rise of the cinema
perhaps most particularly.
This teatro frivolo never disappeared of course. Even when the
shows themselves seemed to lose popularity, the style and humor
and intent, as well as some of the routines, lived on in other forms
and in other places. Cantinflas, Mexico's brilliant humorist and the
people's philosopher, moved from carpas to film. And the carpa tradition, which migrated north to the U.S. as part of Mexican-American popular culture, went on to inspire other kinds of popular theatresmost notably teatro Campesino in the 1960s.
For many of the women artists represented here, teatro frivolo
(and its many variations) served as a marvellous vehicleshort, critical, funny, flexiblefor achieving their own goals. Griselda
Gambaro, for example, picks up the "teatro grotesco " (a mordant and
incisive genre related to the short teatro frivolo) to convey the
grotesque character of the "Dirty War." Stripped, the one-act play
offered here, is an example of the adaptability of this genreas
capable of entertaining and playing with its audience as of critiquing
its "frivolity." This short piece brutally depicts the escalation of violence during a period of political crisis, and the inanity, even "frivolity" of the public's response. In fact, the short grotesco genre here
serves both to index and critique certain aspects of teatro frivolo
itself. For Jesusa Rodriguez, the teatro frivolo model provides a basic
and flexible framework for much of her cabaret-type performance.
In a 1999 piece, Palenque politico, Jesusa and Liliana stage a political horse race, with the candidates for Mexico's presidential election vying for the lead. In the midst of this, Chona Schopenhauer
(Jesusa) comes on in a red sequin skirt, a "folkloric" white blouse,
her hair in a ponytail and ribbons, riding a wooden horse which she
wears as a skirt held up with straps. Her philosophical reflections,
very much in the tradition of carpas and Cantinflas, elevate uncertainty to an existential condition: "We never know what's going to

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INTRODUCTION 19
happen tomorrow," she reminds us. Life in Mexico is a crap shoot,
as fickle and as arbitrary as "la loteria nacional"a national game
along the lines of "Bingo." The audience plays and the objective lies
in being the first to fill one's board. The boards and the cards
which usually reflect traditional images such as the heart, the cactus,
the drunk, Death, the moon, the mermaid, and so forth, have been
updated to reflect Mexico's current national figuresthe wetback,
the coyote, marijuana, the ATM machine, and the cellular phone.
At the end of the game, things end the way they always do in
Mexico, with raucous accusations by actors and audience alike of
corruption and fraud.
Within the formulaic, "frivolous," and flexible framework of this
short art form, then, artists have found a broad range of possibilitiesfrom the merciless critique by Gambaro to the more playful,
yet equally trenchant attack by Jesusa Rodriguez. Astrid Hadad has
taken up a variation of this form by staging her forceful political
intervention within the traditional genre of a cabaret performance.
She sings some of Mexico's most beloved songs, only to make
explicit the violence embedded in the popular imaginary. "Me
pegasta tanto anoche" (You beat me so much last night), she sings,
holding herself up on crutches, her arm in a sling, her head bandaged. Between the songs, she carries on her political analysis: How
is Coatlicue, the Aztec mother of the gods, the same as and different from the Virgin Mary? Both got pregnant by some mysterious
immaculate conceptionCoatlicue swallowed a feather as she
swept, while the Virgin Mary was filled by the Holy Spirit. The difference? Well, Coatlicue, like all "Third World" women, was
working like a beast of burden, while her "First World" counterpart
could dedicate herself to prayer.
Astrid Hadad (like Jesusa Rodriguez, Diana Raznovich, and
Sabina Berman) also focuses on the politics of representation itself.
In her performances, she takes on some of the most "Latin American" of icons. Her costumes, elaborate constructions representing
Coatlicue, or a Diego Rivera painting, or some other famous figure,
make literal a highly coded system of stereotypical images. The set
design for her piece Heavy Nopal, for example, includes a huge
cactus, a large stuffed heart, and many of the other images people
associate with Mexico. She aims to subvert the images that have regulated the formulation of gender identity for Mexican women (from
sainted motherthe Virgin of Guadalupe or Coatilcue, the Mexicana "mother" of all Mexicansto the macho woman with high

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20 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE

heels and spurs. Hadad's Heavy Nopal suggests that the narrow grid
provided by the stereotype which reduces and fixes a one-dimensional image serves only as a critique for those who are able to see
the violence of the framing. Hadad repeatedly poses with her face
in a frame as a reminder that representational practices have long
shaped what can and cannot be seen. In a "tableaux vivant" of a
Diego Rivera painting, she humorously bears the weight of stereotypical accumulation and "anxious" repetition. She is all-in-one:
the Diego Rivera girl holding calla lilies, the soldadera (revolutionary fighter), the bejeweled Latina, loaded
down
with
rings,
bracelets and dangling
earrings, the India with
the hand-embroidered
shirt, long black braids
and a bewildered look
about her. The overmarked
image
of
telegenic
ethnicity
signals the rigid structuring of cultural visibility. The parodic selfmarking reads as one
more repetition of the
fact, one more proof of
its fixity. Latin America
is only visible through
cliche, she suggests,
known solely "in transAstrid Hadad's Heavy Nopal
lation." Hadad plays
with the anxiety behind these images of excess, pushing the most
hegemonic of spectators to reconsider how these stereotypes of cultural/racial/ethnic difference are produced, reiterated, and consumed.
In their various ways, these women have made important progress
in opening a greater discursive and representational space not only
for the issues they espouse, but also for their right to command
public attention. The reasons that women born in the 1950s and
1960s have entered previously restricted public spheres are numerous. In the Southern cone, the long periods of military dictatorship

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INTRODUCTION 21
strengthened the resolve and even militancy of many women who
could not accept the inhuman restrictions imposed on them and
their families. Even women, like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo,
who had never thought of themselves as "political" took to the
streets. This period saw the rise of women's political mobilization
in numerous ways: grassroots organizations, feminist groups, militancy. Another reason for the increased visibility of women throughout Latin America is economic crisis and the migrations of male
workers: more women have been forced to work outside the home
even though social mores continue to stress that a "woman's place
is in the home." Concomitantly with new market demands, women
have increased access to education and, thus, the professions.
Foreign influences, omnipresent in mass media and technology, have
also changed "local" perceptions and expectations. NAFTA, MERCOSUR and other "global" market initiatives facilitate access to
consumer goods and ideas. And, of course, people travel more than
ever, whether as tourists or as immigrants, destabilizing rigid
borders and stable identity markers. All these factors contribute to
the enhanced visibility and activity of womenalbeit slowly
throughout Latin America.
In the last decades of the 20th century, then, we witness an emergence of styles that draw directly on various popular forms and
emphasize the relation between performance and the visual arts.
The simultaneously intimate and public nature of these performance
styles contributes to attempts to interrupt social and aesthetic
systems, and to motivate and rehearse civic participation with the
spectators. The artists also put into visible circulation the traditions
that characterize Latin American cultures, so imbued with global
influences deriving from complicated histories and social circumstancesin Nestor Garcia Canclini's words, its "multitemporal heterogeneity" (3). They remind us that the much-glorified "Indigenous Past" elides the very present predicament of impoverished
native communities relegated both to the "past" and to the economic
margins. The colonial legacy of Hispanic and Roman Catholic institutions continues to exude its power, and specters of inquisitorial
scrutinizing and prohibitions continue to haunt the present. Patriarchy permeates and structures all social formations at the macroand micro-level. Meanwhile, the cultural imperialism of the U.S.
threatens to relegate performance interventions into the off off off
shadowlands of neo-colonialismpoor Latin America, so far from
God, so close to the United States, as the joke goes. Rather than

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22 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE

accept that the "real" action is taking place somewhere else, these
performers rail back. At a performance of Heavy Nopal in Miami,
Astrid Hadad sweetly asked her audience in broken English: "Do
you understand Spanish?" When most of the audience shouted back
"NO!"
she said, "Well, learn it!" and went on with her show in
Spanish. Who's marginal now? While claims to access are constantly
being denied to minoritarian populations, this too can change. These
women assume the task of dismantling codes of signification that
bestow meaning and inscribe themselves upon the individual and
collective body. Each excavates "universal" and local sources to
uncover and expose the structures of power at the base of their
society. They recuperate and recirculate the visual, linguistic, symbolic, and, more recently, technological codes that circumscribe
identities and modalities of seeing, representing, and knowing. In
different ways, their performative styles simultaneously interrogate
the politics of representation and the strategies of power written
across the female body, which serves as both the message and the
vehicle. They expose the social theatrics that circulate Woman and
women as commodities in a landscape upon which capitalism, even
more charged in the age of neo-liberal economic treaties, so intrinsically depends. The normative habit of fixing the gaze upon the
human body is challenged through a variety of strategies, for
instance by juxtaposing light and sound, contrasting visual and tonal
elements, exposing the disembodied nature of the discourses of
power, and capturing or framing the spectator within the gaze of the
performer. The performances, in their own ways, disassemble the
sacred national and religious iconography in which Woman has been
traditionally portrayed as either saint or sinner, virgin/mother or
whore, but always passive and dangerous, in order to make explicit
its constructed, not "natural," nature. These artists create an artistic language through which ruptures and gaps produced by such
representations generate spaces of critical potential. They experiment with re-writing the scripted roles for women configured by
masculine systems at different historical moments, systems whose
authority and endurance are based on sacred textswritten, verbal,
and visualand other strategic modes of self-authorized control of
the Other.
Cultural revolutionaries and holy terrors, these performers are
every macho's nightmare, every politician's headache, every clergyman's despair. But in this particular case it might be fair to rejoice
that "from the terror of the many, comes the delight of the few."

INTRODUCTION 23

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Notes
1. The selection of the people included here is limited, unfortunately, due to several circumstances. The good news is that there are
far too many women artists, if we include singers, performers, playwrights and directors, to include in a single volume. The bad news
is that some of the essays on artists that we very much wanted to
includeRosa Luisa Marquez, Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, Isabel
Juarez Espinosa, Teresa Rallicould not be included in this volume.
The editors see their work in this field, as well as the field itself, as
very much in progress.
2. Puerto Ricans, although they hold U.S. citizenship and passports, are not allowed to vote in U.S. presidential elections.
3. This list is in no way exhaustive. As scholars and practitioners
uncover and take a closer look at archives and cultural artifacts, and
as we rewrite theory to displace the systems of valorization that have
marginalized or ignored much artistic production, the number of
women shown to have significantly impacted the Latin American
social and cultural landscapes grows.

Works Cited
Costantino, Roselyn. 2000. "Performance in Mexico: Jesusa
Rodriguez's Body in Play." In Corpus Delecti. Performance in
Latin America, ed. Coco Fusco, 63-77. London, NY: Routledge.
. 2000. "And She Wears it Well: Feminist and Cultural
Debates in the Work of Astrid Hadad." In Latinas on Stage,
eds. Alicia Arrizn and Lillian Manzor, 398-421. Berkeley:
Third Woman Press.
Dueas, Pablo and Jess Escalante Flores, editors. 1994. Teatro mexicano. Historia y dramaturgia. XX Teatro de revista (18941936). Mxico, D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las
Artes.
Garca Canclini, Nstor. 1992. "Cultural Reconversion." Trans.
Holly Staver. In On Edge. The Crisis of Contemporary Latin
American Culture, eds. George Ydice, Jean Franco, and Juan
Flores. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York:
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Stoklos, Denise. 1992. 500 AnosUn Fax de Denise Stoklos para

Cristvo Colombo. So Paulo: Denise Stoklos Produes
Artsticas Ltda.
Taylor, Diana & Juan Villegas. 1994. Negotiating Performance.
Durham: Duke University Press.
. 1997. Disappearing Acts. Durham: Duke University Press.