By Diana Taylor and Roselyn Costantino

This 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 either ethnically or artistically. Diana Raznovich (1945), a feminist playwright and cartoonist from Argentina, descended from Russian Jews who fled the pogroms at the turn of the 19^th 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. Diamela Eltit, born in Santiago, Chile (1949), has a Palestinian grandfather. 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 Rodríguez (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. Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinosa, co-founders of the FOMMA in Chiapas, Mexico, both born in the 1960s, are Tzotzil Mayan and Tzeltal Mayan, respectively. El teatro de la máscara (the Theatre of the Mask), a woman’s collective from Cali, Colombia, which started in the early 1970s, includes women of diverse ethnic origins. Teresa Ralli, a founding actor, director, and writer of Peru’s foremost theatre collective, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, is a Limeña of mixed ethnic origin. Teresa Hernández, from Puerto Rico, is a fair-skinned mix of African, indigenous, and Spanish ancestry that characterizes the mestizaje of the island. The same is true for Tania Brugera (1968), a Cuban performer who explores the long history of extermination and political repression and intervention 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, and political turmoil that often results in displacement and exile.

Yet there are many reasons—cultural, economic, political, military—why all these women identify as “Latin American.” All of them—whether from the highlands of Chiapas or the far reaches of Europe—undergo 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 violent contact with European colonial systems. From the 16^th to the 18^th centuries, highly ambivalent structures of ethnic identification both flattened and highlighted ‘difference.’ While all native groups were reduced to “Indians,” terms such as “mestizo,” “mulatto,” “zambo” and many others came to designate the racial by-products of miscegenation. 19^th and 20^th century nationalisms privilege national over ethnic identity, even as they ground nationalist policy in racial distinction. While several countries celebrate their glorious native past (especially in Peru and Mexico), and envision the ‘nation’ evolving from pre-Conquest empires, they nonetheless expolit and disparage contemporary “Indians.” Some of the authors and activists included here, especially Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, Isabel Espinosa Júarez, Jesusa Rodríguez, and Teresa Ralli, 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. The Mayas, for example, spread out over three modern nations—Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize. Tania Brugera, to posit a radically different example of the same phenomenon, envisions a “greater Cuba” that spans both sides of the Caribbean to transcend recent political chasms. For Teresa Hernández, an artist from a “Tiny Country… the only pre-state country in existence,” the struggle has been to define herself as “Puerto Rican” and, by extension, Latin American, rather than accept a colonial status as a second-class citizen of the United States. 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 identity—that is, a political, rather than biological, matrix.

For each, moreover, “Latin America” proves quite different—for some, it consists of huge metropolitan centers like Mexico City, São Paulo, Lima, 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?

“Amérique Latine,” like “America,” are European constructions—the first coined in mid-19^th 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” landmass 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 Dutch-speaking 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^th century, Simón 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^th century, José Martí wrote “Nuestra América” (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.

Nonetheless, 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. Geopolitical identity has less to do with “essence” than with conditions of (im)possibility and oppositionality. Latin American gains its political edge through negation: not European, not U.S., not “First World.” It becomes easier to see “commonalities” in practices and strategies: 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-- broadly understood here to include theatre, performance art, and political performance interventions-- as a means of contesting a socio-political context that is repressive when not overtly violent. Some make their political intervention through writing—whether 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, engaging in self-mutilation, or abandoning one’s traditional dress.

These artists represent three generations that have grown up and worked in periods of extreme social disruption—whether it was Argentina’s “Dirty War” (1976-83), or the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1984), the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1987), the decades of civil conflict and criminal violence in Colombia, the divided Cuba that resulted from Castro’s revolution, the 1968 massacre of students at Tlatelolco and the 1985 earthquake and recent student strikes in Mexico City, or the civil violence between the Peruvian military and Sendero luminoso (the ‘Shining Path’) of Peru in the 1980s and early 1990’s.

While female artists and activists have played a pivotal role in human rights and social justice movements in Latin America—we need only think of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo or Rigoberta Menchú—the 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 Menchú 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 self-imposed 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 an internationally acclaimed 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 máscara in Colombia has been in existence longer than most collective theatre groups. Nonetheless, it remains virtually unknown because, members claim, people simply don’t care about “women’s issues.” Jesusa Rodríguez, a legendary artist who is considered to be “the most powerful woman in Mexico,” (Tim Weiner, “Pummeling the Powerful, With Comedy as Cudgel” (NYT, June, 15, 2001, A4), still survives on the margins of Mexico’s artistic and intellectual communities. And so it goes for most of these women.

For these artists, then, political intervention (in the broadest sense) takes on many forms and many fronts including national and ethnic political movements, human rights activism, anti-dictatorship battles, and struggles around issues of gender, sexual, and racial equality. Often, in these struggles, they come up against the Catholic Church. Since the implementation of the “Holy Inquisition” in the 16^th century, the Catholic Church has sided with civil authorities in the repression of disenfranchized groups—Jews, native Americans, African Americans, and, of course, women. During the various “Dirty Wars” in Latin America, the Catholic hierarchy usually sided with the dictators. They blessed the military’s weapons with holy water and turned in “subversives” who revealed their dissidence during confession. Liberation theologists were either targetted for murder or forced out of their positions. 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 artists 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 audiences—local, national, and international. Most of these artists have forged their own space—physical and/or professional—to stage their aesthetic and political acts of resistance. Some clearly needed to find their own ways of working, having been closed out or expelled from existing groups or organizations.

Jesusa Rodríguez 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 hábito (the Habit) cabaret and El Teatro de la Capilla (the Chapel Theatre) in 1990. Rodríguez, like Astrid Hadad, began training at the Center for University Theatre of Mexico´s National Autonomous University (UNAM)—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 Rodríguez 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 Rodríguez was told she had no right to be onstage because she was too ugly.)

At El Hábito, the audience of lefties, lesbians, gays, and intellectuals can always expect to find new political satires and other kinds of outrageous performances by Rodríguez and Felipe; El Teatro de la Capilla usually typically features full-length plays. Though coming from the margins, Jesusa Rodríguez’s influence has grown to such a degree that her comments, ideas, and performances become front-page news in Mexico’s leading newspapers.

El teatro de la máscara has also founded its own space in which to work in Cali, Colombia—assuring the women access to a performance space and the development of their own audience. Interestingly, the theatre forms part of the women’s home, intimately connecting their work to personal struggles for survival and social acceptance. Nonetheless, the group undergoes constant transformation as members come and go in their efforts to earn a living.

Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, a group of nine artists, appeared on the Peruvian scene thirty years ago, using theatre to support workers during a violent mining strike. Since then, they have used a hybrid form of indigenous and western performance modes to address the country’s most urgent political problems: the massacre at Soccos (Contraelviento, 1989), the violent dislocation of populations due to civil conflict (El retorno, 1996), the ‘disappearances’ and mass murder that had become common political practice (Adios Ayacucho, 1990), and most recently the one-woman Antígona (2000). The sections from Antígona included in this volume, were developed and acted by Teresa Ralli, and written by poet José Watanabe, to address the long-term trauma suffered by the families of the disappeared. Yuyachkani has its own ‘casa’ with a two-hundred seat theatre, a mask-making workshop, a video room and archive. (Figure )

Petrona de la Cruz Cruz and Isabel Juárez Espinoza founded FOMMA, a cultural center primarily for Mayan women and children. They conduct trilingual workshops to help women in their community deal with the many problems they face both in the local and national arena. Through theatre, FOMMA addresses issues of cultural identity, displacement, domestic violence as well as gender, racial, and economic discrimination. This space allows them to assert their views and civil rights in a society that has doubly excluded and silenced indigenous women—they are marginalized by the meztiso society around them, and silenced by the men in their own communities. (Figure?)

But even artists who don’t control their own physical space have found ways of controlling their interventions. Astrid Hadad, who always performs with her band Los tarzanes (the Tarzans), 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. Diamela Eltit uses her body as the site of violent confrontation. During Pinochet’s dictatorship, she transgressed all boundaries by reading from her fragmented performative novel, Lumpérica (E. Luminata) in a brothel as she cut herself. Ema Villanueva and Katia Tirado, two young performance artists that Antonio Prieto discusses in his essay in this volume, erupt unexpectedly in Mexico’s political scene—Ema Villanueva started her work by performing a one-woman demonstration in response to the student strike at UNAM. She invited spectators to write their views of the political situation on her body. She has since gone on to create performances that highlight the little-discussed practice of political disappearances in Mexico and has joined forces with human rights organizations. Katia Tirado, dressed as a wrestler, takes her performance of sexual and gender identity into the most popular spaces in Mexico—the famous market of La Merced. 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. Diana Raznovich, as a dramatist and cartoonist, works mostly by herself in Madrid, having recently left her native Argentina. 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 it’s been lonely, she admits with her usual love of understatement.

While their artistic goals, media, and strategies vary—one 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, a solo performer, 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 says, “it’s all in the books.” Later, once the 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 cartoon—as 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 Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe, whose aesthetic inspiration draws from cabaret and 19^th century revista (review theatre), likewise turn their formidable talents to making fun of repressive social systems and the audience’s complicity with them. “Mexico’s elite has never had it so bad,” as Tim Weiner puts it. 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 aesthetic position. While we use the term performance broadly to refer to their work, that term finds no satisfactory equivalent in either Spanish or Portuguese. ‘Performance’ has commonly referred to ‘performance art,’ and in certain places (like Mexico) it comes out of the visual arts rather than theatre. Translated simply but nonetheless ambiguously as ‘el performance’ or ‘la performance,’ a linguistic cross-dressing that invites English speakers to think about the sex/gender of 'performance,' the word is beginning to be used more broadly to talk about social dramas and embodied practices. In spite of charges that 'performance' is an Anglo word, scholars and practitioners are beginning to appreciate the multivocal and strategic qualities of the term. While the word may be foreign and untranslatable, the debates, decrees, and strategies arising from the many traditions of embodied practice and corporeal knowledge are deeply rooted and embattled in the Americas. 'Performance,’ then, signals overlapping practices: theatre, conceptual art, solo performance or uni-personales, performance art, body art, and acciones—political happenings or interventions.

These artists nonetheless belong to a long line of outspoken women performers and artists. Their performances pay tribute to, and often “cite,” the paths of trailblazers in various arts in the 20^th century throughout Latin America: singers such as Mercedes Sosa, Elis Regina, La Lupe, Chabuca Granda, Lucha Reyes, and Chavela Vargas; artists such as Frida Kahlo, Bekis Ayon, Ana Mendieta; actresses such as María Felix and Dolores del Río, playwrights such as Rosario Castellanos, Elena Garro, 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 puertoriqueña 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-worked the famous song “Adelita” to question the quietism of contemporary women: “¿Dónde estás, Adelita? ¿Dónde estás, 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^th century, these recent performers also draw liberally from popular theatre styles of the late 19^th and early 20^th century known as teatro frívolo or frivolous theatre. These traditions have served not only the “frivolous” artists—such as Diana Raznovich, Astrid Hadad, and Jesusa Rodríguez—but the more “serious” ones as well. Sabina Berman´s plays, or Teresa Ralli’s Antígona, for example, look like traditional Western theatre. But a study of the content and tone of these works reveal non-traditional treatment of a broad spectrum of “universal” and Latin Amertican themes. In some of these plays we find elements of street theatre, indigenous theatre based on oral tradition, and soap-opera melodrama, an important part of Latin America’s cultural production and consumption and, these artists and many others laughingly admit, a part of the ‘national’ character as well.

Teatro frívolo 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 frívolo such as cabaret, sketchs, teatro de revista (revue), teatro de carpa (itinerant theatre, literally, under a tent), and street theatre. According to Pablo Dueñas and Jesús Escalante, the term teatro de revista (the ‘review’) 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 parodic—characteristics 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 and the U.S. Southwest, 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, 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 life—political, 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 of teatro frívolo. Writers drew their material from daily events in the cities and throughout the provinces. Theatre and song transmitted news and information, voiced sociopolitical criticism, created a sense of nationhood and of ethnic or national identity. Realistic and symbolic characters—including the street vagrant, the revolutionary, fancy cowboys, the innocent virgin, the prostitute, the rancher, students, dancing skeletons, politicians, the cabaret diva, and the drunk—were constructed through iconic gestures and spoken through popular language characterized by the use of albures 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, corridos ranchera, tango, música romántica) 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 community—but 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 imaginary, 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 cosmovisión 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 frívolo began to fade into the background in the late 1920s and early1930s due to cultural trends gaining currency in the various countries: the rise of the cinema perhaps most particularly.

This teatro frívolo 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 theatres—most notably Teatro Campesino in the 1960s.

For many of the women artists represented here, teatro frívolo (and its many variations) served as a marvellous vehicle—short, critical, funny, flexible—for achieving their own goals. Griselda Gambaro, for example, picks up the “teatro grotesco” (a mordant and incisive genre related to the short teatro frívolo) to convey the grotesque character of the “Dirty War.” Stripped, the one-act play offered here, is an example of the adaptability of this genre—as 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 frívolo itself. For Jesusa Rodríguez, the teatro frívolo model provides a basic and flexible framework for much of her cabaret-type performance. In a 1999 piece, Palenque político, 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 in folkolic dress, 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 happen tomorrow,” she reminds us. Life in Mexico is a crap shoot, as fickle and as arbitrary as “la lotería nacional”—a national game along the lines of “Bingo.” 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 possibilities—from the merciless critique by Gambaro to the more playful, yet equally trenchant attack by Jesusa Rodríguez. Astrid Hadad has taken up a variation of this form by staging her forceful political commentary within the traditional genre of a cabaret performance. Astrid Hadad (like Jesusa Rodríguez, Diana Raznovich, Denise Stoklos, 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.The parodic self-marking reads as one more repetition of the fact, one more proof of its fixity. Latin America is only visible through cliché, she suggests, known solely “in translation.” 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 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 women—albeit 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 circumstances—in Néstor García 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 macro- and micro-level. Meanwhile, the cultural imperialism of the U.S. threatens to relegate performance interventions into the off off off shadowlands of neo-colonialism—poor Latin America, so far from God, so close to the United States, as the joke goes. Rather than 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 texts—written, verbal, and visual—and 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.”

Notes

1. The selection of the people included here is limited--there are far too many women artists, if we include singers, performers, playwrights and directors, to include in a single 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 Rodríguez’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 Arrizón and Lillian Manzor, 398–421. Berkeley: Third Woman Press.

Dueñas, Pablo and Jesús Escalante Flores, editors. 1994. Teatro mexicano. Historia y dramaturgia. XX Teatro de revista (1894-1936). México, D.F.: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes.

García Canclini, Néstor. 1992. “Cultural Reconversion.” Trans. Holly Staver. In On Edge. The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, eds. George Yúdice, Jean Franco, and Juan Flores. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Hutcheon, Linda. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge.

Stoklos, Denise. 1992. 500 Anos—Un Fax de Denise Stoklos para Cristóvão Colombo. São Paulo: Denise Stoklos Produções Artísticas Ltda.

Taylor, Diana & Juan Villegas. 1994. Negotiating Performance. Durham: Duke University Press.

_____. 1997. Disappearing Acts. Durham: Duke University Press.

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