Embodied Memory in Las Horas de Belén. A Book of Hours.

Roselyn Costantino

Over the last few decades scholars, artists, and activists have expanded the breadth and depth of the feminist practice of recuperating women´s lives, voices, and worldview. They do so by filling the gaps in the story of humankind as they uncover the myriad ways that the structures of knowledge, memory, value, representation, and power inextricably intertwine. In this tradition, in Las Horas de Belen. A Book of Hours, a team of U.S. and Mexican women artists utilizes the body and the lived experiences of both performer and spectator as instruments to excavate and record the multiple dimensions of women´s realities, the systems constructed to dominate them, and their subsequent strategies of resistance. Through their performance, the artists wrench previously obfuscated consequences of those systems from the domain of the symbolic. They make visible the real bodies that bear the markings of violence perpetrated upon women. In this way, the body materializes as both vehicle and message–caught between the spaces where the discourses of culture, aesthetics, gender, and identity intersect with those of power in its multiple manifestations.
The award-winning production of Las Horas de Belén. A Book of Hours took shape over a period of two years, debuting in Mexico City and then opening in New York in 1999. The collaborators include Ruth Maleczech, director of New York-based Mabou Mines; visual artist Julie Archer; Jesusa Rodríguez, Mexican director, actor, writer, and feminist activist; her partner, Argentine-born singer-composer Liliana Felipe (PI); and poet Catherine Sasanov who, at the time, was writing poems inspired by the history of Mexico City and the circumstances of the founding of Belén (1683), an infamous sanctuary/prison for women in Mexico City. Sasanov´s poetry, influenced by the writings of, among others, Rosario Castellanos, Eduardo Galeano, and Charles Bowden, served as the base of the script (consisting of minimal director´s notes, song lyrics and projected writings). While working on Las Horas de Belén, the women were deeply affected by current reports of unsolved rapes and murders of hundreds of young women working in the maquila factories in U.S.-Mexico border towns. Official indifference to this violence echoed the stories that they were uncovering about the women in Belén.
As the collaborators engaged in a type of archeological dig of the technologies designed to perpetuate certain cultural forms and stories while erasing others, they were also discovering the heterogenous, hybrid nature of Mexican society. This hybridity is due in part to the failure of hegemonic forces as witnessed by the historical coexistence in Mexican culture of transgressive social subjects and imposing dominant forces–traces of which surfaced during the research for the piece. The artists found broad but related discrepancies, gaps or slippages, between proscribed female behavior and what women were actually doing on all social stages. Versions of female identity supposedly cemented into powerful symbolic systems did not account for the variety of manifestations of being woman evident in Mexican society.
During the last three decades in Mexico, where the female body has served as the stage upon which national identity has been constructed, feminist scholars, writers, and artists have devoted much energy to the task of locating the persistence of women´s intervention into spaces to which they supposedly were denied access and to representing women´s resistence to systems designed to control every aspect of their life. In particular, collaborator Jesusa Rodríguez has dedicated much of her substantial body of artistic and social activist work to re-creating performative acts as she creates new ones, not only for the sake of adjusting the historical record but also to expand the culturally imbedded, albeit hidden, repertoires available to Mexicans today as they constantly reinvent themselves in the face of the crises inherent in modern life in a country, as the saying goes “so far from God, so close to the United States.”
Through the collaboration with director Maleczech and Mabou Mines, this work continues in Las Horas de Belén. These artists demonstrate how Mexico´s controlling elites establish authority and memory through technologies that create and circulate symbolic systems, and how the marginalized call upon these same technologies to resist, transgress, and survive the norms imposed by those systems. The artists utilize the very technologies designed to eliminate from memory traces of bodies not convenient to the central powers, so that Las Horas de Belén focuses on perception and interpretation as well as the struggles for power implicit in both processes.
Beginning with the Mexican colonial period, the collaborators cross geographic boundaries to recuperate and present voices of women whose lives spanned centuries–memories of the living and the dead surface to reveal themselves like the Aztec pyramids that continue to push through the floors of contemporary Mexico City. Lest the violence upon which the New/Old World Order was founded be forgotten, the creators of Las Horas de Belén implicate the connections between 16th-century colonization and turn-of-the-millennium globalization and thus contribute to contemporary discourse on topics ranging from human rights and environmental issues to neoliberalism and religious fanaticism.
Central to their artistic project is the interrogation of historical events and social phenomena. How did (and does) domination look and feel to the women who lived it? How do bodies remember and what traces exist of the body written across by the dominant? How are these traces inscribed and hidden in our interior and exterior universes? Precisely where upon or in the body and psyche do those memories reside? Do they persist and continually transmit in spite of changes in cultural circumstances over time? Will the history of resistance, made visible, generate energies required to effect change in the institutions perpetrating the violence? If, as a quote projected at the beginning of the performance suggests, “History is an archive of deeds undertaken by men; all that remains outside history is forced into the realm of conjecture, fable, legend, or lie,” how can stories be told and bodies represented given our imbedded modalities of seeing, being, knowing, representing, and remembering? The creators of Las Horas de Belén raise and begin to answer these questions while creating an intense sensation that the musing is not purely theoretical and that the theoretical “impossibility of representation” is not an option.
This essay examines how, in the act of creating and performing memory–both emotional and corporeal–, Las Horas de Belén explores the processes of the production and representation of memory itself. The verbal becomes secondary, challenging language´s use by dominant elites to bestow value rather than communicate. The task of signification and articulation, then, falls upon the live colonized body as an artifact that, with its signatures of gender, race, economic class, and ethnicity, provokes a reading of history as racially and sexually marked. The dialogue initiated between the technologies staged in the piece–that is, the camera and bulb flashes, multiple types of projections, the canvas, the human eye, and architectural designs–makes explicit the politics of representation and the structural invisibility of systems of privilege and power, including those that circulate “Woman” and “women” as commodities in a landscape upon which capitalism so intrinsically depends. The new configuration of historical “mementos” and traces presented by the artists obviates the disparities between history as it is discursively transmitted and memory as it is enacted by the body bearing its consequences. That same body intervenes here, as it has on social and theatrical stages for centuries. The repetition of certain movements and acts reproduces the formulation of cultural norms, their transmission and perpetuation, and the patterns of transgressions–all which occur through the very act of repetition. In addition, the presentation of acts which traditional histories “mis”represent or narrowly interpret makes available the realities of women living outside the norms in relative autonomy and on their own terms.
Belén: Theoretical and Historical Background
In How Bodies Remember, Paul Connerton notes that we invent ourselves by performing our past in the presence of others. Las Horas de Belén not only recreates that process of invention, but also participates in the ongoing operation of identity formation. The body in Las Horas de Belén acts as both surrogate and trace, as the eraser and the erased. The collaborators of Las Horas de Belén recycle the spectacles and icons of Mexican cultural, social, political, and religious life as they remember, create memory, and, ostensibly, forget. They create the conditions necessary so that their audience might participate in that process.
The program notes explain that Las Horas de Belén explores the lives of the women locked away in the Recogimiento de Belén, a sanctuary created by the Catholic Church in Mexico City in 1683. This was an historical moment characterized by a social and cultural “big bang”–the collision of Hispanic European, American Indigenous, and African universes–initiating an ongoing, unbalanced struggle for power and interpretation. Some recogimientos provided refuge to poor, non-white women who were among the most affected by the colonial experience. Like convents, most of these recogimientos were truly sanctuaries, dedicating their safe space and relative autonomy to women devoted to prayer, to single women choosing not to marry or desiring to pursue intellectual inquiry, and to widows, orphans, abandoned wives, actresses, or women sent there for safe-keeping by their families. El Recogimiento Para Mujeres de San Miguel de Belen, however, was not one of the success stories of women´s communal living. After a brief period of offering temporary assistance to destitute women and their children, the founding priests, Barcia and Pedroza y Sosa, bricked the windows and placed guards at the doors so that once a woman entered, she could never leave. They lured or coerced to Belén poor women considered dangerous by the Catholic Church. Since many of these “offensive” women were not among regular church-goers, the priests roamed the streets, taverns, and brothels in the poor sections of the city to literally hunt them. Pretending to be looking for a good time and promising temporary shelter and food, Barcia and Pedroza y Sosa seduced women, particularly prostitutes, into the hell that became Belén, where a life without privacy consisted of a rigid, unforgiving regime of long hours of prayer and physical labor (Benítez 172-187). A life, the piece suggests, not unlike women´s lot as wife and mother within the domestic realm or as a factory worker in a contemporary global economy. Woman, a projected quote (flash) suggests, “is raised to the altar of the gods; that is, when she is not confined to the courtyard of the unclean; when she is not branded as a prostitute, crushed by the servant´s burden, expelled from the church, from politics, or the university classroom.”
The “holy” men who ran Belén believed that they served as God’s proxies, “saving” women from themselves and society from women. Their power was indeed both real and perceived: they based their authority on written and visual sacred texts and employed other strategic modes of self-authorized control including designing an impenetrable physical structure and controlling basic bodily needs. By removing women´s bodies from circulation and dominating their minds, they came to embody the universalized male power figure. While some women adapted to this lifestyle, many rebelled or went insane, others committed suicide, and a few escaped. The Mexican government took over Belén in 1860 and converted it into one of Mexico´s most notorious prisons for men and women. Belén was finally torn down in 1935.
Organizing Structures
Las Horas de Belén provides a steady flow of sensorial stimuli designed to locate and recreate the stories of the women of Belén while clearly referencing the repetition of their stories in kitchens, sweat shops, maquilas, and fundamentalist societies around the world today. These stories are presented through Rodríguez´s actions in a series of eighteen short scenes connected by technical and discursive interventions (photo flashes and interruptions), and through a wide variety of “artifacts” that perform several operations. In this way, the artists emphasize rupture, contradiction, and the non-verbal. The array of aural and visual elements woven into the set, costume, and lighting design, and into the gestures, movements, and music creates an accessible record, a map, of women´s past with a focus on how it is experienced and repeated, or challenged and altered, through time.
The title of the performance piece, Las Horas de Belén. A Book of Hours, foregrounds the organizing structures of space and time which become broad metaphors for all the stories to be summoned. First, Belén itself (religious sanctuary/prison) evokes the many spaces and social institutions which contribute to the confinement, commodification, and consumption of women, in particular, and to human fragmentation, in general. “Prison,” a projected flash notes, “is nothing but a reproduction, amplification, and concentration of society´s most profound contradictions.” Rodriguez´s actions create these spaces as she moves through what seems to be a convent, the home, a factory, a prison, or reformatory–the architecture of each operating upon the body in its own particular way to produce and reproduce behaviors and to form and transform individuals. The configuration of such structures, as Foucault notes, creates the perfect disciplinary apparatus that permits the “policing functions of surveillance....the disciplinary gaze” (174) and surveillance becomes “dissassociable from the systems of industrial production and private property, and property” (175). Colonial society and, arguably, contemporary Mexican society, classifies woman as property and therefore such surveillance and confinement of them appear logical within that context. And, as human right´s groups and other social activists remind the consuming world, the rationale of capitalism repeats that “logic” in the maquilas (assembly factories) where modern technology increases, not eases, the oppression and exploitation of the mostly female workforce.
The piece´s title also contains the second structuring element, time. A book of hours is a prayer book containing prescribed readings for each hour of the day, verses of supposedly comforting, forgiving, healing words that through their recitation save the tortured soul for eternity and bring peace to chaos. Here, however, these repeated verbal petitions symbolize the repetitive nature of the women´s lives. Intended to invoke salvation, the prayers belie the terms under which these women were fraudulently lured. In Belén, by way of the prayer book, life is regulated by horas, as it is in factories, brothels, and in the home.
In Las Horas de Belén, Archer´s scenic and light design, and the music composed and performed by Felipe evoke these temporal and spacial configurations and the relationship between them. The set consists of three large panel backdrops. The right panel is blank. The left is a wall, with sections of wood, plaster, tin, and cardboard, and a nook with a candle and a statuette of the Virgin Mary. This wall suggests the boarded-up windows of Belén or of the shacks in shanty-towns like those of Tijuana or Juárez, places where windows and living conditions offer little hope of escape. In the lowest section of the left panel we see a low, sliding, smoked-glass door that, although it opens, leads to nowhere. Throughout the performance, Archer projects drawings of colorful flowers on this left panel. Reminiscent of the intricate paintings that adorn the prayer books` pages filled with inspiring words of hope and redemption, here Archer`s projections frame images of pain and suffering resulting from man-made apparatuses of power. Similarly, the squares of tin on the wall evoke small popular religious paintings of Mexico called ex-votos or retablos. As public announcements or offerings commissioned to express gratitude for a miraculous cure or divine intervention, ex-votos perform the connection of the earthly and the spiritual worlds as they celebrate human faith in God´s availability. On this panel, however, the desired celebratory effect is muted, cancelled, and violated by the juxtaposition of the tins with boards and bricks that close off and lock in. Through the presence of Rodríguez´s body and her actions performed in front of or on this wall (including frustrated attempts to escape and her suicide), and the light and sound (screams, howls) projected around it, spectators construct traces of women removed from circulation to remain in horrific conditions where no sound or light enters and there is no contact with the outside world. Hence, the enclosed women cease to exist. As a wall, this prayer book panel becomes a concrete representation of institutionalized divisions between the dominant and subordinate. It gives us windows and doors that don´t connect spaces, and a Virgin Mary, a physical vehicle for God on Earth, unable to aid the women upon whose altar She reigns and whose faith is their only hope.
The center panel consists of two levels of large, hanging, white Mexican rebozos traditionally worn by Indigenous and mestiza women. Through variations in design, these beautiful hand-woven shawls constitute an artistic expression of individual and regional identity–precisely that which is denied in the spaces represented by the left wall. On these rebozos Archer projects words (Spanish translations of Sasanov´s poems) and images that either compliment or contrast the story told through Rodríguez´s gestures and actions. Written across the rebozos and, thus contained within a feminine context, the stories claim a voice and an authorship that reference specific categories of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, and geographic location.
The musicalization of Sasanov´s poems further complicates re-presentation of the production and transmission of culture imprinted with patriarchal ideology. Seated at a piano located in front of the prayer-book panel and dressed in a Mariachi suit, Felipe plays her compositions and sings the lyrics–Sasanov´s poems–that parallel the stories being performed center stage. The musicalizing of the poems, notes Maleczech, reproduces the sensation of sung prayer (PI), although the strong, and at times aggressive, rhythm and tone of most of the songs do not replicate “sacred” melodies. The music moves between elite and popular forms and often clashes in tonal quality with the “feeling” of the lyrics. Additionally, the lyrics might compliment the stories being acted out or reveal conflicting versions of them. In this way, similar to the ex-votos and bricks on the left wall, dramatic tension is created in the contradictions inherent at the level of both form and content.
Archer´s lighting design adds to the complexity of these “stories.” Her visual environment consists of projected paintings, prison graffiti, drawings, and dramatic photographs: a young Indian woman with a dead child against her bare breast, a maquila worker walking in what seems to be a wasteland, a collage of strong women of all ages, many of whom transgress norms through their poses, clothing, or accessories. In contrast, there are few props on stage to compete for spectator focus. The sparsity of material items emphasizes Woman not as a possessor of property but as the thing possessed. The small, enclosed, indeterminate (and flexible) nature of the set establishes all the confining spaces to which we will be given access in the seventy-five minute performance.
Exposure is a central structuring metaphor around which the multiple audio and visual elements are organized in Las Horas de Belén. The constant flow of images and sounds creates an information overload, constantly forcing us to choose where to look. No matter how attentive, sights and sounds escape us; our vision is partial. Breaks occur throughout the piece. A series of double blasts of light violently interrupts brief instances of total darkness and silence, punctuating the sudden appearance and disappearance of projected texts called flashes. These flashes significantly enhance the fragmented nature of the performance while, simultaneously, structuring it. The blasts of light and sound jolt us into reading these flashed interjections that, then, the following episode or tableaux represents or challenges. A few examples of flashes include: “Like certain refined forms of torture, household chores must be repeated as soon as they are done”; “Being a parasite has its own charms, but when the first maid disappears, then our first furious rebel will appear”; “Three generations of Spaniards can wash all the Indian out of a bloodline, but no one can wash the black out of the blood”; “Prison is nothing but a reproduction, amplification, and concentration of society`s most profound contradictions”; “History is an archive of deeds undertaken by men; all that remains outside history is forced into the realm of conjecture, fable, legend, or lie”; “The hand that stretches out to strangle operates in full daylight and has many names: Oppression, Poverty, Injustice, Dependence.”
The flashes invoke the process of exposing facts, events, observations that traditional histories obscure. The technique of the flash spotlights the slippery nature of “truth” and “reality.” Do the blasts produced on stage remind the spectator of the loud and bright bulb flashes of early portrait cameras, associated with the then new and exciting possibility of capturing reality on film? Or do they recall the flash of a magic wand and the magician´s slight of hand? Truth or trick? The spectator is constantly assessing. The flashes repeatedly interrupt the human eye´s and the camera´s naturalizing effect which produces the “real” through mimetic correspondence with the “seen.” In fact, the flashes are so bright that they produce a momentary white blind spot, and thus disturb the eyes´ natural memory of an image that gives continuity to the series of images perceived. In this way, while participating in the process of recording, the flashes expose a faulty ability to reproduce and perceive the real. Or rather, the flashes reveal the real as always subject to the mechanisms of reproduction, perception, and interpretation.
Outbursts are another source of structural fragmentation in Las Horas de Belén. They function to interrupt the focus from center stage while offering parallel stories: with each outburst an unidentified woman narrates from a small cell-like space, to the extreme right, high above and straddling the unmarked division between stage and the audience. Seated on a chair, dressed in a short, tight, low cut dress, her legs spread, she suggests society´s “loose” woman. By pulling on handcuff and shackle-style wires attached to her wrist and ankle, she produces sudden loud, jarring noises, like metal hangers smashing against metal. Periodically, these startling sounds cause spectators to swing around and look up at her as speaks. Her texts consist of poems and other writings by Sasanov which recount stories we might find if we search alternative news sources, but that do not normally form part of official records. Stories about abuse, neglect, corruption, and impunity we wish were not true. Can we, do we choose to believe her? As a loose woman (in jail?) she constitutes an unreliable voice. While performing a seemingly unauthorized informant and transgressive (and therefore punished) woman, her crashing outbursts violently challenge the mechanisms of representation, whether the form be visual, oral, or written. In spite of being restrained, she forcefully commands an interpretation of facts based on the evidence she reads off victimized bodies.
The female body at the center of this piece is caught invisibly and silently between the hours and spaces of the title, simultaneously marked and invisible, feared and desired, and caught in Mexico´s symbolic systems informed by the virgin/whore binary. In spite of the performance´s density of signifiers, the body sets the focal point, as spectators, trained for the most part in Western traditions, continually turn their gaze to the female body moving silently and powerfully through the prescribed actions which woman is destined to repeat. Rodriguez`s body anchors the piece as she presents herself as a woman whose body both aches under the weight of the technologies designed to suppress it and, then, releases itself as by transforming those same technologies into instruments of expression. We witness the movement back and forth between these realities as we move quickly through the short scenes. The body of which Rodriguez claims ownership in one tableaux, utilizing it as her chief commodity in an outdoor market, becomes in another the object of a male factory supervisor´s rape; in contrast to the body she painfully attempts to “whiten” for survival in a racist society in one moment, in the final scene exudes power, as Rodríguez portrays a cocky, bubble-gum blowing, high-top sneakered woman who now wears her rebozo as a short, strapless dress and looks defiantly and purposefully at the spectators, returning their gaze. In each instance, we witness the processes of bestowing corporeality upon that body thereby rescuing it from simultaneous invisibility and symbolic public display. The artists´ construction of Las Horas de Belén mimics these battles for interpretive power that occur on the body`s surface flesh and its interior universe, struggles as much a part of the colonial experience as of contemporary globalization and neo-liberalism.
Las Horas de Belén breaks with traditional narratives and seeks to establish new grammars to read and articulate women`s previously untranslated stories. Structurally, the episodes, flashes, and outbursts seemingly flow into each other, creating a performative unit that traces how the body moves and how the codifying markers of race, gender, social class, and ethnicity mark it externally and internally. Simultaneously, the performance lays bare our underdeveloped ability to read and value them and recasts women´s bodies as the site for what Judith Butler and other theorists refer to as the process of “expansive rearticulation” (1993, 218). The artistic collaborators initiate this rearticulation by citing specific historical events and geo-political contexts and by exposing the mechanisms which perpetrate women´s suppression and more generalized social injustices. They are circumstances recognizable to audiences on both sides of the Mexican border, although the particular perspective shifts according to the spectator´s own markings, that is, his or her cultural and ethnic influences, gender, social and economic class, age, and so on. Several scenes exemplify the process.
Exposition: Un recuerdo del porvenir/A Memory of Things to Come.
Las Horas de Belén´s opening moment (noted as “prologue” in the program) establishes the temporal structure and the attitude of the performance. The title comes from Mexican author Elena Garro´s novel in which the narrator is the voice of a rural Mexican town during the religious wars of the 1920s. The history of the town, the war, and, by extension, Mexico, is told through the lives of prostitutes–unlikely reliable sources. One of the prostitutes is frozen in time, turned into a statue at the edge of town as she attempts to escape. Reproducing the tension and intent of Garro´s work even as spectators enter the performance space, howling winds carry the haunting cries of women in pain, filling the darkened theater and setting the tone for the next seventy-five minutes. The lights come up, revealing a woman (Rodríguez) of indeterminate identity dressed only in an off-white chemise and scarf. A factory worker, a maid, a housewife, an inmate, a nun, a prostitute? Her loose, sack-like, colorless clothing creates ambiguity about her identity while it visually erases corporal markers of sexuality. She irons, grimacing with back pain and sweating feverishly. Her movements–dramatic, mechanical, Chaplinesque–create a sharp edge between the comic and tragic that surfaces and is sustained throughout. The effect is evidenced by the audience´s tentative laughter that alternates with blank-faced silence. Rodríguez/the woman crouches over and sneaks around the table. The disembodied nature of authority becomes visible as she glances from side to side as if she knows she is under surveillance by some invisible power and must avoid being caught. Suddenly, projected bars of light place her in a prison cell, reproducing woman´s metaphorical and literal confinement. Whoever she is, she is destined to repeat actions which, her gestures indicate, inflict extreme discomfort and aching aloneness as she is relegated to a small space with a large capacity for pain and suffering–her own private Belén.
The subsequent photo flash, “Like certain refined forms of torture, household chores must be repeated as soon as they are done” captures the embodied memory of things to come. The woman doesn´t speak, only groans, grimaces, screams, laughs, and, on two occasions, sings with Felipe. Her silence (self-imposed? forced?) speaks volumes. Language is side-lined, not permitted to contaminate the viewers´ access to this reality. No words are needed as Rodriguez´s mastery of movement and gesture vividly recreates the pain, fear, levity, and defiance that express as well as comment on woman´s state. Silence in Las Horas de Belén is not that of tranquillity, security, or peace, but rather of the reality of victims unable to speak their horrors or vindicate the crimes committed on their bodies. The scene ends with the woman frozen in the act of pained labor. Similar to the tableau vivants of earlier centuries that were used to display women being punished for their social transgressions–an extension of the Church´s purgatory and hell to pay for sins–this dramatic live painting suggests that woman is paying her debt and that this payment is eternal. In the next episode, “La criada/the Maid,” the woman´s silence is exaggerated; she is gagged, her eyes cast to the floor. Moving her hips and shoulders seductively, she dances Cinderella-like with a broom, dancing with a prince whose mythological nature she seemingly acknowledges and mocks. She pulls off the gag, and laughs; not a silly, girlish laugh but a defiant one.
As “scenes” flow into each other, and in seeming response to the transitional flash “So when was a woman not hidden away?,” the woman´s daily routine takes her outside, to the streets, to La Merced market where her actions conflict with the pessimistic attitude of women´s confinement and their objectification as their only “way to be.” With her long braids tied up on top of her head, Rodríguez hawks her merchandise, a watermelon, a metaphor for her body, her flesh, her sensuality, genitals, and the baby to which she eventually gives birth. Objectifying and offering herself for consumption, Rodríguez takes the melon and dances around her stand, showing herself off. She is for sale. She inserts herself into the economy of insatiable desire while conflating the symbolic nature of Woman as object of desire and the real, individual body upon which that process is scripted. Rodríguez lifts her dress to expose her thighs as she looks seductively and defiantly at the prospective buyers or, in this case, at us, as spectators who consume her image. Like a slave at auction, but performing the acts upon herself, she opens her mouth and lifts back her lips to show her teeth. Sexualizing and gendering the experience, Rodríguez drops the shoulder of her dress to expose her breast, lifting it up on the wide blade of a large butcher knife with which she plays. She moves close to the audience, tauntingly aiming the blade in its direction, letting it slip from her hands, the tip penetrating the floor boards directly in front of startled spectators.
The outdoor market literally becomes a “meat” market; Rodríguez becomes body fragments: teeth, legs, buttocks, breasts. Her humanity negated, she is a “parcelled-out body,” a prostitute who, like a head of cattle, is cut up as meat and displayed to show off its health and beauty. She is neither Woman nor a woman here, but rather a disembodied mouth, breast, thigh. We move back and forth between the idealized woman of poetic tradition and a dehumanized woman as a piece of meat, the ultimate sign of consumption. Rodríguez, the body performing, uses her eyes to make herself appear somewhere between the two contradictory positions: she looks directly at individual spectators, forcing engagement. Both Rodríguez and the spectator materialize as individuals, albeit momentarily, in that live exchange, in the clashing of glances and gazes. Rodríguez´s body and facial gestures, her laughter laced with arrogance, her wielding of the knife across her body/meat, reveal a shift in agency. She forces the consideration of women as active participants in the economy of desire for the pragmatic ends of survival: prostitution puts food on the table and pays the rent for the children and spouses of the sex workers. In this light, the shift from woman as victim or object to woman as business person deals a castrating blow to the masculine power structure.
During this scene, Archer projects onto the center panel´s white rebozos of 16th-century codex drawings of an Aztec market. In doing so, the piece´s creators foreground the ancient nature of both the commodification of woman´s body engraved with ethnic and class markers and woman´s resistence to it. The accompanying song performed by Felipe tells of a little girl who is “a piece of run-down property” and whose “only possessions are other people´s dirt” and the “string of purple bruises strung around her neck.” Her only desire is to have a tear tattooed beneath one eye “just to remind her how to weep.” Codified as someone else´s property–a thing–the woman appears to feel nothing. Throughout the piece, however, women´s interior universe–inextricable intertwined with the surface flesh–seeps slowly through the skin and gazing eyes. While this aspect of women´s humanity is ignored in artistic expression that reflects the masculinist perception of and desire for women´s bodies, and is also unaccounted for in colonial or capitalist economic policy making, in Las Horas de Belén women´s interior, intimate, and most immediate worlds reveal themselves. The process of rearticulation of women`s experiences occurs here through performance of embodied memory of strategies of resistence, exemplified in several scenes.
In one instance, an outburst jolts us from one scene and transports us across time and space to the present day U.S.-Mexico border. In “Our Names,” the interrupting voice from the woman in the cell above the audience speaks to the facelessness of women on the border, women whose names are remembered by authorities only when it is economically advantageous or when the nameless begin to stand up, to speak up for their rights. The names are recorded so the women can then be identified, classified, terrorized, and, if necessary, disappeared. These names, the woman in the cell laments, appear only “on a wall, tattooed on our friends, engraved on our tombs; they´re on the tip of the tongue, on the lips of our enemies.” In the tone that characterizes most of her outbursts, she adds defiantly, “It’s our names that keep reappearing no matter how often a bureaucrat tries to erase them.”
The woman in the cell, through her voice, records the acts of resistance of the women on the border, recuperating their otherwise seemingly lost resistance to domination. The traces left by these women–their names in police files, on tombstones, or prison walls–recall James C. Scott´s “hidden transcripts.” In Domination and the Arts of Resistance, Scott posits that within seemingly compliant social behavior there exist hidden transcripts filled with covert acts of transgression. Like Scott´s hidden transcripts, the women´s names are evidence of acts of resistance that, while not necessarily able to bring immediate change to the dominant system, do erasure of the subordinate by hegemonic forces. The woman in the cell participates in that resistance through her act of recuperation of their names and their fate.
Globalized economic activity and the universalized nature of gender, class, and ethnic exploitation referred to in this outburst move center stage in the subsequent scene, “The “Prostitute.” This scene features Rodríguez dressed as a garment factory worker in a short green smock with a picture I.D. pinned to the front. On the back panel a very large projection of a young Mexican woman walking in what seems to be a desert wasteland appears; she wears the same factory uniform. For many spectators, the projection and Rodríguez evoke images of young maquila factory workers on the border. Tijuana? Juárez? Rodríguez begins to sew a man´s coat, first by hand with an enormous needle and then on an imaginary industrial sewing machine. Grimacing, her whole body vibrates in sync with the machine with which she becomes one as she laboriously moves the coat across the table. Noisemakers reproduce the mechanical click of the machine or a clock that marks time. Glancing to see if she is watched, she sneaks away with the finished coat and climbs up to the second level to a lighted space behind the white rebozos. Is she leaving, stealing the coat? Is she reporting to another part of the factory, handing in her work? From behind the rebozos we see the coat, that hung and animated, transforms into a man. A client? Her boss? The coat-man and Rodríguez appear like shadow puppets and dance until suddenly the man becomes violent. He strikes her, rips off her dress, falls down on her and rapes her; vicious dogs bark. She screams; it´s over. The woman sticks her head out from the shadows, between the rebozos. In a one-time interaction, all three women–Rodríguez, Felipe by the piano, and the woman in the upper cell–shout foul, street-language insults at the “man,” challenging his manhood. But there is no real man on stage to receive the insults, just the feared, disembodied masculine power that permeates most social spaces. Futile protest; they are the ones who are screwed. Factory worker, prostitute, or cabaret singer, possibly all mothers, the episode suggests them to be one and the same thing. Prostitutes at least get paid.
The intertwining of capitalist greed and masculine power continues to inform subsequent scenes, as revealed in the flash,“From the misery of many comes the extravagance of the few.” On stage, Rodríguez dances with the watermelon as if it were a pregnant belly while Felipe belts out the lyrics to “The Prostitute”: “The girl´s the empty space between her legs men fill with cocks and coke”; “She´s the room that functions as love´s slaughterhouse–She´s one more heart laid out to butcher; men inquiring about the price of meat.” Next we see Rodríguez playing with the large knife and then, in a violent motion, sinking it into the watermelon. It is her fruit that is penetrated, violated. She stands behind the table upon which she has placed the melon with the knife buried deep, the exposed black handle as proof of the act. In absolute silence, she picks up the tablecloth to cover her body, her arms outstretched like a cross. The words of “The Prostitute,” quoted above, now begin scrolling up the cloth, over the fruit, the knife, her body, over her face and her lips which are covered by a bright red rose petal, the only color in this black and white image. The words fade into the background: “cocks and coke. [...]. She´s a receptacle and storage bin,” “Bare cross above her bed where she pried Jesus off his crucifix then shoved him in a drawer. No voyeurs from heaven looking on. Just the Virgin Mother on her shelf. Mary who knows a guy can fuck you over without even pulling out his dick.” The word “dick” scrolls slowly over the knife, upright and strong, blade penetrating down into the still fruit. The verses moving up to the woman´s red-rose petaled lips emphasize again the savagery inherent in the processes of disembodiment and commodification of Woman; it is one of the piece´s most intense moments. The Virgin Mary, encased in the Bible and in the myth of her virgin conception, here is ripped from passiveness to active violence. The lyrics and scrolled text sacrilegiously suggest that, like the women to whom she is held up as a model and a symbol of women´s pure nature, she, the Virgin, was fucked. The virgin/whore opposition is conflated in this tableaux as the Virgin Mary moves across the binary to share the space of the traditional chingada or fucked one of Mexican culture, la Malinche. Ambiguity, duality, and contradiction intervene as the piece demolishes powerful symbolic myths of women´s nature.
Tatoos: Inscribing the Virgin/Whore Dichotomy
Competing groups have long waged battles for interpretive power in Mexico´s public sphere and on women´s bodies. Both became sites of identity construction and reaffirmation. Visibility–the staging of identity in that sphere–becomes a strategy for the consolidation of power. The binary virgin/whore lies at the center of those strategies. Myths and images of the Virgin of Guadalupe (the brown virgin mother protector) and La Malinche (Cortes´ mistress, whore, traitor, Mother of the mestizo race, la chingada or fucked one) are cemented into the national consciousness. Volumes have been dedicated to understanding the ways in which Mexicans understand themselves and their national identity through these paradigms. Ironically, in many of these cases, the hegemonic intent could not determine the outcome. For instance, during the colonial period, historian Fernando Benítez observes, “The great enemy was the human body in general and women´s bodies in particular. The greatest ambition consists of whipping it, humiliating it, and punishing it, in removing the greatest number of women possible, hiding them or keep them prisoners for being the cause of the greatest evils” (16). Established ideals of feminine behaviour and general assumptions about patriarchal society´s success at confining and suppressing women contradict, however, women´s lived experiences and their role in society. Several important studies document the presence of women in the public sphere, engaged in economic activities not only in Mexico, but in other Latin American countries. Skidmore and Smith note that, contrary to the stereotypical image of a male patriarch presiding over his wife and a large brood of children, most families had two to four children, and,
not all women married, and those who did often did not remain married for life. [...] By 1811, according to census results, only 44% of the adult females in Mexico City were married. Many women were widows, and approximately one-third of the households in Mexico City were headed by single women [...] many Mexican women spent much of their lives as single women” (20-21).
The actions of women (and men) of all classes daily broke with codes of behavior. Yet, then, as now, even in the face of such information, the perception of women´s role in society, by both men and women, remained traditional (Lavrin 28).
Altering perception and underscoring conflict and contradiction motivate Las Horas de Belén. The piece reminds the audience of the Catholic Church´s attempt to generalize and naturalize women´s evilness and to cement it into cultural consciousness through its expansive symbolic system (rituals, prayers, all manner of icons and visuals, and taboos). A flash explains that “A priest had a vision of a prostitute in Hell: The woman´s robes and hair were on fire; flames shot out of her mouth, nose, eyes, ears; serpents coiled around her, and scorpions covered her body.” In both form and content, however, the piece also insists on the manipulation of knowledge perpetrated by prevailing structures of power which, Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis suggests, despotizes a nation and its people, “destroying morality as a collective concern and reducing it to the status of an individual problem. It means death of a social morality and the encouragement of a petite bourgeoisie morality based on the need to create taboos, whereas any genuine morality is based on the ability to make free choices” (23). Basic dignity and human rights underlie the piece´s conjugation of the Female Body with Mother and Prostitute, and its interchanging of the terms “woman,” “sexuality,” “poverty,” “darkness,” and “public space.” It removes women from the abstraction of Mexican culture and art where, as Debra Castillo notes, the sexualized woman´s body, “is at the same time insistently present and disturbingly abstracted into a play of trope, which is also an unconscious social commentary. Beneath the myth of the glamorous, sensual, but sexless prostitute, lies the reality of grinding poverty, of an undeveloped country suffering though a series of economic crises and political changes” (18).
On stage, Felipe belts out in mariachi style, “En este lugar maldito/donde impera la tristeza/no se castiga el delito, se castiga la pobreza” (In this damned place they punish not the crime, they punish the poverty). The catchy refrain somehow insistently and disturbingly echoes in this spectator´s head. The signifying space of the prostitute conjures up its binary opposite, the silently suffering pure Mother, equally cemented into Mexican national mythology. In Las Horas de Belén, the powerlessness of the real mother is manifested in a series of large projected images: a young Indian mother whose dead baby is pressed against her bared, desexualized breast; the Virgin Mother powerless to help those female prisoners, some whose children live with them in prison, upon whose body she has been literally (as a tattoo) or metaphorically inscribed; and the bodies of raped and murdered maquila workers. These images, brought from obscurity and arranged in a syntax that reconstructs events and deconstructs the rhetoric surrounding the sacredness and veneration of the Mother, draw gasps and hold the gaze of the viewers. Belén´s virgin is the Virgin of Guadalupe, with “downcast eyes,” never able to engage in the mutual gaze that might constitute her as a subject. Throughout the performance, scenes such as “Guadalupe Tatuada/Tattooed Guadalupe” and “The Suicide” continually question not only the workings of her myth, but the reality of the “lie” or falsification to all those, like the masses of poor in Mexico, who look to her for the protection promised in this powerful religious and national icon. In each case, the real bodies that carry the apparatus of procreation remain violable and vulnerable to systematic domination. In the process, the constructed nature of gender is naturalized: desire is masculinized, the desired feminized, “marked for gender,” posits Rebecca Schneider, “as if by some great accident of God” (5).
Similarly, we find evidence of resistance to such control from the early days of the “appearance” of the Virgin of Guadalupe, when, while attempting to “convert the pagans,” the Church could not restrain her cult worship as she became a syncretic spiritual image for the indigenous and mestizo masses. More recently the Virgin of Guadalupe has been appropriated by various Mexican artists and grassroots movements as a symbol of racially-marked oppression and by the Chicana feminist movement as a symbol of female strength and spirituality. In the following scenes, the artist collaborators of Las Horas de Belén employ a similar strategy by appropriating technologies that were originally designed to construct identity, create official memory, and circumscribe behaviors.
Technologies and Spectacle: Castas and Photographs Two such technologies are castas paintings and photographs. The scene “Castas Painting No. 13. Black + Indian = Cambuja” de-naturalizes certain social memory, exposing the ideological underpinnings of the mechanisms of recording. We witness social memory as performative, not only in the manner suggested by Connerton (we remember through commemorative acts which we perform) but also in the sense that these mechanisms perform upon the bodies of certain members of the targeted social group. Commissioned throughout the 18th century, castas consist of a series of twelve to eighteen small scenes (on a single or various canvases), depicting the complex process of mestizaje or mixing among the three major groups, Indian, Spanish, and African. Following what Ilona Katzew refers to as “a specific taxonomic progression, the first scenes portray figures of “pure” race (that is, Spaniards): a “white” couple with one or two children, lavishly attired to reflect their higher status. Each subsequent painting features a man and woman of different races with children and an inscription categorizing that particular racial mix (Black + Indian = Cambuja of the scene´s title). As the family groups become more racially mixed, their social status (and level of “civilization”) diminishes. In one painting, a man of color appears about to beat his wife thereby naturalizing the connection between violent nature, race, and poverty.
While showing the cultural and racial diversity of the colony, castas clearly reveal a hierarchically organized society based on limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) at a time when sexual contact, concubinage, and intermarriage were eroding ´race´ as an indicator of status and creating great insecurity and anxiety in the elite over the loss of control and privileged status (Katzew 12). Castas paintings, then, performed the scientific racism established to give ranking and social disability a biological basis. By framing social hierarchy within the family trope, castas alluded to a sense of unity within the hierarchy and promoted an image of domesticity that masked racial tensions and “naturalized” the overall social hierarchy. Subordinating woman to man and child to woman seemed natural, and so “other forms of social hierarchy could be depicted in familial terms to guarantee social difference as a category of nature” (13). Castas painting can still be found in Mexico, in museums, history books, for sale as reprints and postcards where they continue to perform upon those they dehumanize and to reinforce left-over, conscious or unconscious, colonizing attitudes. As self-portraits of self-declared, “scientifically”-based superiority, castas simultaneously violate the souls of those dark bodies (a soul denied by a dominant institution, the Church), as they both create and contain fear in the dominant viewer of what might become of society if the dark masses were to prevail.
In the scene “Castas Painting No. 13", that soul bares itself, speaking through the voice of a cambuja woman and the body of Rodríguez. In the song of this scene, a young cambuja woman cries her shame when she finds herself in the position of spectator of her own and her family´s objectification and public display. She comes across their portrait in a castas hanging on a sacristy wall, “my station in life/hung like a station of the cross. /The one portrait/ever made of my family.” Echoes of her pain surround Rodríguez, herself exhibiting traces of her indigenous ancestry. She performs these portraits as reproductions not of only colonial society, but of its ruling ideology of race. Rodríguez bares her upper body and in ritualistic movement, covers it and her face with egg and white flour. The song´s lyrics remind us of the attitude that whiter is better in a society where the body is a commodity and non-whiteness a discriminating marker: “All the broken colors that can make up a body [...] a body sold as a bed, a black backdrop. All the times that men paid to lay their hands on my skin just to see their flesh made even whiter.” The flash of this scene adds, “Three generations of Spaniards can wash all the Indian out of a bloodline, but no one can wash the black out of the blood.” Defeated, Rodríguez washes off the flour as her darkness cannot and will not be disguised. She finds her escape in suicide, as she hangs herself with her own long black braids. Her body becomes the instrument and signifier of her death. Unlike the painting, Rodríguez´s live body demonstrates the effects of such codifications which spill over beyond the frame of the painting to the women who reveal the experience of being the dark other. “Look how I shattered inside my flesh,” tells the woman in the song, “I nailed my Christ back on the cross for all the good that he´d done me. Nailed him out of my way then stepped off the balcony towards some other salvation. [...] I am the fish that slips through your nets.” In what some may claim an unacceptable resolution, suicide belies the powerlessness often ascribed it. As Sasanov comments, it was a most powerful act in the face of the vivid, terrifying warnings by the Catholic Church of eternal damnation (PI). A sense of empowerment becomes the attitude of the final scene “Saint Thaïs.”
Photographs constitute the second technology central to the visual syntax of Las Horas de Belén as they insert the controversy over their characterization as unmediated representations of the real. Photographs, posits González Rodríguez, introduced Mexico to a modern technique that “identified, discriminated, classified, prevented, dominated, pursued, and punished” (274). One of the first official uses of photography in Mexico was to control prostitution. In 1865, drawing on photography´s proclaimed civilizing abilities and promise of progress, city officials employed the photograph to capture the body of the prostitute in what González Rodríguez refers to as a sociopolitical strategy of control and modernization. Ironically, at the recently converted prison of Belén, they established a registry of prostitutes´ photographs and their personal information: age, previous employment, address, sicknesses, marital status, and category–first, second, third, according to the judgement of their attractiveness by the civil servants, doctors, and “sanitary police.” The photos were studio shots, with a backdrop, mirrors, columns, or other props; many women appeared in their finest apparel, some adorned with expensive jewels, revealing a cross-section of class and ethnic groups. “Is this woman really a prostitute?” became a cliché of the 19th century, a question that, according to González Rodríguez, along with the photos themselves, exposed the hypocrisy of control and isolation, the moral double standard of the times, and the inaccuracy of the myth that all prostitutes were poor and dirty women of no means. The women, in this way, like their cabaret dancers-counterparts, performed both the marginalization, suppression, and transgression that marked their lives.
González Rodríguez suggests that the myth of the prostitute in Mexico can be understood by studying its origins as an image that captures and presents the body of the prostitute and in which “we can distinguish at least two creative strategies: the first refers to the photograph for control of brothels; the second refers to the photograph of the prostitute and the brothel as the center of underworld of urban life” (274). The camera, a machine announcing the advent of progress and civilization, introduced Mexicans to themselves as a mosaic of contrasts and mixtures. Upon the portrait of the individual, dominant elites founded a sense of nation and its “paternalistic order where the moral values begin to establish the secularization of Catholic code of behavior with the ideas of the Enlightenment” (González Rodríguez 275). Ironically, the official recognition of prostitution afforded by the registry created an appearance of acceptance that many criticized and fought until the legislature repealed the law establishing the register in 1940 (González Rodríguez 277-279).
The photograph goes on to claim a key role in the establishment of the identity of modern Mexico and the modern Mexican, particularly during the dictatorship of President Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). In Positivist zeal, Díaz ordered photographs of his family featuring white clothing, white gloves, a white background, white skin, and white souls that set Motherhood and purity as the cornerstones of the patriotic family and the family as the cornerstone of a patriarchy that permeated all social and political institutions. These visual representations of the new Mexican complimented Díaz's social programs in constructing a Mexican nationalism upon the base of Hispanic and Catholic morality as well as on European (mainly French) mannerisms. All these become indelibly imprinted on official versions of Mexican national character. Availing himself of the power of the visible and the ability to mass produce the photograph, Díaz moved to transform Mexican identity, to Europeanize, to civilize the "barbarous" masses, by theatricizing the moral superiority, elegance, discretion and money of The Distinguished Families. Their image, characterized by whiteness, was sealed in and mass distributed through photographs (Monsiváis 1977, 18-19).
Reminiscent of the castas paintings, photographs have a more far-reaching capability due to their facility of reproduction and dissemination. Marginal groups, Monsiváis contends, including the poor (usually dark-skinned, more mestizo or indigenous than European) and "fallen women" (semi-nude or nude Divas of cabaret) were literally "captured" in photographs that eroticized and exoticized the subject matter while, at the same time and perhaps most importantly, safely distancing it from the spectator. Ironically, Monsiváis observes, due to their popularity and accessibility, these photographs were widely available thereby bringing these marginal groups, prohibited pleasures, and repressed desires into spheres–including the national consciousness–supposedly protected by safeguards designed to keep them out (18-19).
Monsiváis reads the photograph and its commercialized version, the postcard, as classist resources that take advantage of images of the pueblo to lock the marginalized in “little windows” reminiscent of a fair´s house of horrors or of a museum of oddities:
Who´s interested in this fancy image of the “grotesqueness” and helplessness of the pueblo? First of all, for the good families, intrigued by the sight of the plebs that have passed close by so many times and whom they have never stopped to contemplate, to see as individuals or perceive as anything more than their generic condition. Thanks to photos, they understand (they believe they capture) a fleeting reality, that which they only accept if it seems a cultural product (in the street, a bricklayer is an almost unnoticed nuisance, a threat to the senses, or a reminder of the dead weight of the nation; in a postcard, he is singular detail of the great city). A member of the bourgeoisie examines the photo, he ascertains just how inoffensive misery is, he comments, he delights for just a second in the opportunities he´s had in life, he spies on the moral of the story without even bothering to pay attention to the words. (24)
Las Horas de Belén blurs the boundaries between intent and repression, between hegemony and resistance. The work ends by inserting conscious acts into unconscious or ritualized behaviors that, according to Connerton and others, constitute and perpetuate memory. By interrupting the repetition of certain bodily movements or attitudes, the creators seem to suggest that the cycle can be broken. Interruption–an organizing element of the performance–signals ruptures of the past and present which hold hope for the future. In the last moment of the piece, Rodríguez reappears on stage, casting ambiguity on her previous act of suicide. She struts into view wearing a short strapless dress (actually, a rebozo she´s wrapped around herself). Wearing high-top sneakers and with her braids pulled up on her head, she energetically jumps up on the table/ironing board that earlier enslaved her. She is relaxed, legs crossed at the ankles and swinging as she chews and cracks gum, grabs it and pulls it out of her mouth, and blows bubbles. Looking young, strong, energetic, cocky, she exudes control of her body and suggests an attitude change that seems to want to introduce a new chapter in the history of women. The scene´s song tells of “an old, old story” of a “beautiful, successful business woman”–a prostitute whose enemy is not her vice, but to a holy man who “messes with her head, [...] locks her in a cell, seals the door with lead the way you’d seal a grave.” “Repent,” “Obey,” he orders; “All lies, all lies, all lies,” the voice responds, demonstrating her recognition of the nature of the game.
Finally, Rodríguez climbs up to the second level and sticks her head out from behind the rebozos and among a large projected collage of photos of women that covers both pages of the Book of Hours. In this way, like the women she metaphorically represents, Rodríguez locates herself both inside and out of the grouping: as one of the women, she momentarily poses and creates a tableau vivant. Then, as she moves her head back and forth to look at the photos and the audience, she, like the spectators, becomes an observer of the women. The women in the photos strike defiant poses: one smokes a pipe; a cabaret dancer, actress, or prostitute seductively displays her long bare legs; the Hispanic factory worker in uniform gazes at the audience. Others exhibit passivity; the legs and sandalled feet of the body of a dead woman partially buried in sand; the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. This inclusion of both real and mythological women creates a sense of timelessness. Rodríguez´s face protrudes among them as she looks provocatively at the spectators, demanding to be seen. Her direct eye contact with individual spectators pierces many mediating factors characteristic of the technologies of representation and reproduction and challenges the habits of reception of theater, including the actor/character divide. For this spectator, this was one of several strong performative moments during which the performance reveals its self-conscious attitude toward its own methodology and ideology while forcing the spectator into that same process of reflection. Many spectators, like Rodríguez, may find themselves both inside and out of the “story,” as both participants and observers of the realities performed.
The photos fade so that only an outline remains, like a numbered key for a magazine photo or a paint-by-number sketch. Rodríguez´s body. Their traces. She becomes the “surrogate” proposed by Joseph Roach In Cities of the Dead. In this study of social memory, performance, and the body, Roach suggests that social memory is transmitted through a surrogate, a process implying both conceptual erasure and recognition of the persistence of the unspeakable violence involved in that erasure. The piece`s final reminder of both the violence and the persistence of memory is a loud exploding sound, like that of Mexico´s imposing volcanoes which lie peacefully for centuries and then, suddenly, erupt. The images of the photos–those women´s traces–and Rodríguez´s body linger in the minds´s eye even after the lights go out. Embodied memories of suffering and oppression and resistance and survival remain. The technologies of spectacle and performance have served both the dominant and subordinate groups, providing, among other things, a visibility, which can be a trap, as Peggy Phelan warns us, or in many instances, a trap door.
Artists who seek aesthetic languages through which they can simultaneously create art and provoke political debate often walk the fine line between a politics of virility and the vulnerability of the representational real against which Phelan cautions. In the case of the creators of Las Horas de Belén, Rodríguez´s, their collaboration has proven fruitful. It is a logical continuation the long trajectories of Rodríguez, Felipe, and Ruth Maleczech of Mabou Mines, a company that for twenty-eight years has studied “life as performance” and believed in “a drama of fusion, a drama where virtually anything–religion, politics, sociology, anthropology, even biology and physics–should be considered a proper mode of discourse [...] when partnered with camp, mime, music, poetry and visual art” (Mabou Mines Company notes). For her part, Rodríguez balances her acts of transgression across the borders of art and political activism, striving to survive economically and physically in the hostile environment of Mexico, a country witnessing a strengthening alliance between capitalists and conservatives. In her response, irreverent figures and myriad artistic forms provoke critical thinking on the stages of her and Felipe´s theatre and bar-cabaret, which have been the target of indirect government censorship and right-wing, conservative protest and violence. Like the women these collaborators perform in the bilingually titled and produced Las Horas de Belén. A Book of Hours, by moving across the boundaries of geography and culture the individual artists are able to gaze inward, and thus better comprehend the “outward.” The constant looking motivates and provokes critical inquiry into the form and content not only of art but of lives.
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