Politics and Culture in a Diva´s Diversion:
The Body of Astrid Hadad in Performance
Roselyn Costantino

Ni contigo ni sintigo tienen mis males remedio.
Contigo porque me matas. Sintigo porque me muero.

Surrealismo: Movimiento político mexicano,
carente de toda moral, ética y estética,
que intenta convencernos de que la realidad que vivimos
es sólo producto de nuestra imaginación.

Astrid Hadad, of Lebanese heritage, (1957) was born and raised in Chetumal in the southern Mexican state of Quintana Roo. She is a product of the heterogeneous, hybrid, nature of Mexican culture. Laughingly she admits, “I don´t know if I´m Maya, Lebanese, Mexican or Gringa!”(PI) not a rare confusion, so to speak, in a country which , according to Néstor García Canclini, is characterized by its "multitemporal heterogeneity," that is, by the coexistence of a number of communities and symbolic systems . Out of Hadad´s meditations on the multiplicity of influences shaping her and other Mexican´s sense of themselves, and on the violence implicit in that process, emerge performances featuring a fast-paced, fragmented, parodic unveiling of traditional Mexican song, dress, and dance. Hadad avails herself of the humorous sociopolitical criticism of cabaret, carpa, and teatro de revista --important theatrical styles in Mexican cultural history. Into these marginal forms of so-called género chico or “light” theatre she juxtaposes national and religious icons with witty vernacular parlance. Her motivations are several: to celebrate cultural experiences that lie at the base of national identity; to critique contemporary political and economic policy; to recuperate and articulate the sexuality, sensuality, and human desires repressed by the morality imposed by the patriarchal institutions that structure Mexican society; to demonstrate the centrality of woman´s body to those institutions; and finally, to entertain. As a woman who has internalized and displays Lebanese, Mayan, and Afro-Caribbean cultural markers, Hadad simultaneously represents, deconstructs, and reinscribes the exotic Other.
Hadad explains that in her early years she was profoundly influenced by the sights, sounds, and smells of the tropics, by Caribbean rhythms transmitted over Cuban radio, and by the films of Mexican cinema´s Golden Age. The silver screen, she explains, impacted her not only with its Divas, many of whom transgressed the roles of the acceptable Mexican Mother or Wife, but also with its creation of a version of Mexico as a nation, as an “imagined community.” As folkloric as that filmic version arguably may have been, even in the remote region of her birth, it made an imprint on Hadad which would manifest itself throughout her career both in body and spirit, as artist, woman, and Mexican.
Passionate about music and with some experience performing in her parents´ restaurant, Hadad discovered that singing and dancing were not enough, that she wanted to create a fuller show, one in which she could articulate through various stage languages her interpretation of the passions and pains of life in general, and of Mexican reality in particular With a B.A. in political science, in 1980 she moved to Mexico City and entered the Center for University Theater (CUT) of Mexico´s National Autonomous University to study acting. Her teachers, quite dismayed at her ideas of mixing cabaret-style singing and carpa and revista sketches with traditional theatre, tried to convince her to come to her senses and study directing. She persisted, however, and at the CUT Hadad was exposed to a new generation of playwrights including Sabina Berman, and formed part of a group of theatre practitioners that experimented in creating cycles of staged dramatic first readings in which the participants switched roles with each week´s production of a new work. In these cycles, Hadad would direct one week, act another, design and construct scenery, work lights, and so on, giving her broad experience in theatre production. The overwhelmingly positive audience response to the innovation (dramatic readings were not usually staged with props and scenery) as well as the criticism from the theatre establishment convinced Hadad of two things: that the public was open to different theatrical experiences, and that she would work independently of the theatre establishment.
Hadad left the CUT after two years, and in 1984 had her acting debut in Jesusa Rodríguez's production, Donna Giovanni. The show, an adaptation of Mozart´s Don Giovanni in which almost all the actors were women and everyone played the Don, was not simply a feminist critique of classic theatre, but rather, as Jean Franco suggests, a celebration of the "libertine" in all of us–that is, of the naturalness of sexuality seen against society's deforming norms (52). After this production, Hadad separated from Rodríguez. She acted in a few telenovelas (Mexican soap operas) and debuted in commercial cinema in the successful Mexican film Sola con tu pareja (Alone with your partner). Most of her energy, however, went into developing her own show which she began to present in cantinas in Mexico City, as she fondly recalls, literally “singing and dancing on the bars because the joints were so small” (PI).
From the initial stages of her shows´ development, Hadad inserted monologues filled with political satire between her belted-out her renditions of ranchera and bolero music. The influences of Mexican musical traditions, of Mexican and German cabaret (which she went Germany to observe), and of the style of the Divas manifest themselves in her early works. She performed Nostalgia arrabalera (Gutter Nostalgia) and Del rancho a la ciudad (From the Country to the City) and La mujer del Golfo Apocalípsis (The Woman of Apocalypse Golf) and La Ociosa...O Luz Levantate y Lucha (The Lazy One...or Oh Luz, Get up and Fight) in various cantinas in Mexico City. In addition to performing in cantinas, she also appeared in Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe´s cabaret-bar El Cuervo, one of very few theatre bars owned by women in Mexico City. El Cuervo also served as a gathering place for many of Mexico´s writers and intellectuals. Hadad soon expanded her show to include the sketches of teatro de revista and teatro de carpa, forms popular from the late 1880s to the 1930s, filling them with humorous sociopolitical criticism. Unconcerned with classifying her work and undaunted by critics who referred to it as frivolous, Hadad incorporated elements of performance styles and spectacle that hadn´t made it into official theatre histories: "My show has its roots in cabaret. I know that in the U.S. they call it performance. My style is syncretic, aesthetic, pathetic, and diuretic, which demonstrates, without shame, the attitudes of machismo, masochism, nihilism, and 'I-could-give-a-damn' inherent in all cultures" (in Beltrán 16). In her racy, non-linear exposition of traditional Mexican song, dress, dance, and political satire, the focus is the female body and its position and representation in various critical discourses.
[Figure 1. Astrid Hadad as La Tequilera in Cartas a Dragoberta. Photo by Cheryl Bellows.]
From these humble beginnings emerge Heavy Nopal (Ode to Lucha Reyes, 1990), Cartas a Dragoberta (Letters to Dragoberta, 1993), and Faxes to Rumberta (1994), some of her best known shows (particularly the first) which are never “completed” but rather are workshops or works in progress to which she adds or subtracts costumes, dances, music, or monologues, at times according to her mood, at times according to the venue’s physical layout and its urban, provincial, or international location. Performing the sensual dances and rhythms of rumba, merengue, salsa, and sones of Caribbean culture found in Quintana Roo, these productions place the female body center stage. Her body serves as both the vehicle of communication and the message. It is a body that continuously re-presents and constructs its gender; a body, according to Hadad, that is both the recipient of social signs of femininity even as it contests them. Through her body´s corporeality, Hadad makes explicit the individual´s material relationship to the larger society. Her work, while entertaining and exploring theatre as an art form, is politically and socially committed. She never attempts to mask its ideological premise; on the contrary, she showcases it, calling her obsession to speak about politics “my professional deformation, that even though I promise myself that I won´t, a political element always emerges because it´s inevitable, it´s what we are living, it’s the anger we feel” (PI). She structures her performance around issues of gender bias, political authoritarianism, religious dogmatism, feudalistic systems whose hierarchies are based on ethnic groups and class distinctions, in general, and on female submission and male machismo, in particular. Layers of clothing and props evoke the layers of meaning of seemingly innocent elements of popular culture that the Mexican audience obviously recognizes and responds to with enthusiastic laughter. The "discourses of power" are situated on a strong female body–a body whose sensuality Hadad emphasizes and takes pleasure in, although in Mexico, it is a body that all structures of society attempt to regulate. This societal control is fortified and guarded by Mexico's "Sacred Cows," none of which escape Hadad's criticism: the Catholic Church and the Pope, the President and other well-known politicians, and of course, macho men and submissive women, some who comprise her audience.
I first saw her show in 1993 in La Bodega, where she frequently performed since 1990. La Bodega is located in the Colonia Condesa, a historic, fashionable section of Mexico City where it is obvious that the spectators in this small but packed theater/dining room are from the middle- and upper-middle class . Not an inexpensive night out by most Mexican´s standards, the cover was 60 pesos ($20 dollars in 1993), plus expensive food and drink. The show that night was Cartas a Dragoberta. (based on a text by Alfonso Morales) Hadad walked through the crowd, climbed onto the stage and joined her two musicians, Los Tarzanes. What followed was a mixture of parodied artistic forms: visual art, dance, music, and theatre of different genres. As in Heavy Nopal and Faxes to Rumberta, Hadad donned a full, green "peasant" skirt of the 19th century, with a frilly feminine white blouse trimmed in red, thus featuring the colors of the Mexican flag, which were also visible in her glittered eye makeup and large, kitschy earrings. This folkloric reference to the china poblana (19th-century women's dress in the state of Puebla, a popular folkloric image) was completed with her long, black hair woven into two braids decorated with red, white, and green-striped ribbon. [Figure 2. With giant white calla lilies attached to her back, Astrid Hadad evokes the Diego Rivera painting of a young indigenous woman holding such flowers. Photo courtesy of Astrid Hadad] See image at the beginning of the section on Astrid Hadad] Giant white calla lilies attached to her back formed a crown or large frame around her head that evoked the Diego Rivera painting of a young indigenous woman holding such flowers. Finally, Pancho Villa-style bullet belts crossed over her chest like a dark, ominous substitute for a pearl necklace. Hadad danced and sang well-known lyrics of a traditional song "I am a virgin watering my flowers/and with the flowers, my identity.” In this way, she playfully juxtaposed the image of the humble, peaceful indigenous girl of Rivera´s painting with a feisty virgin or a playfully seductive prostitute. Similarly, Rumberta of Faxes begins as a rather innocent provincial woman who breaks with patriarchal traditions, and travels alone to Mexico City. In the city, she develops another vision of life and of her place and role in it. She decides to live her life on her own terms, regardless of the cost. Hadad suggests that Rumberta, like herself, becomes a cabaret performer, a woman who enjoys life and “claims the self-dignity of not selling herself to anyone” (Dávila 41).
For all their folkloric critique, Hadad's costumes are beautiful, many with historical value. By representing objects of popular culture within this parodic frame, she references Mexican kitsch, exemplifying the inscription of the indigenous and provincial as folkloric and exotic. The non-Western becomes synonymous with innocence, beauty, and nature. Such stereotypical representations distance "ethnicity" from the reality, and elide the many crimes—past and present--committed against indigenous peoples. Only recently have images of activist indigenous women made it into the media, with the ongoing coverage of migration at Mexico-Guatemala border and the visibility of women´s leadership roles in the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas. Simultaneously, scholars continue to reevaluate the role of women in Mexico´s history. For instance, we have witnessed the resignifcation of the soldaderas, the women soldiers of the Mexican Revolution. Once considered camp followers who cooked for and provided sex to the soldiers, they have acquired the status of cultural icon. The soldaderas are now the subject of academic studies, fiction, and documentary writing. As commercialization often accompanies recuperation, vendors on the street and high-end stores offer photos of these women (especially of Adelita, an anonymous soldadera immortalized in revolutionary folk songs) on t-shirts, postcards, bookmarkers, and album and book covers.
The use of women in economic exchange always lingers in the background of Hadad´s work. She folds onto herself the objectification and consumption of woman within neoliberal capitalism as she simultaneously participates in her commodification—not as passive object but as a woman with an attitude. She attempts to maintain control of as many details as possible in the production of shows and music, the latter which circulate nationally and internationally. Her CD and cassette covers feature Hadad in dramatic poses, similar to those on front covers of Mexican and US magazines in which she dons provocatively ironic (and ironically provocative) costumes. Through her success as a businesswoman and artist, Astrid promotes the increased visibility of women. As a Mexican woman who designs, produces, performs, and therefore owns her show (her stage, her body), she provides an alternative model to women´s traditional participation in cultural production. Or at least, an alternative model of the history of that participation.
[Figure 3. Astrid Hadad pays homage to Coatlicue, the Aztec Mother of the Gods, now forced to adapt to the conditions of present-day Mexico City. From Heavy Nopal. Photo by Cheryl Bellows.]
By overlaying the images with contradictory humorous gestures, bawdy linguistic play, and the critical commentary implicit in the props and makeup, Hadad creates ironic and satirical tones that permit her to revive, connect, and resignify constructing symbols to reflect the hybridity that marks Mexican culture. She strikes a chord in the illusive concept of ser mexicano or Mexicaness by, without falling into nostalgia, underscoring those sights, sounds, smells, traditions, and historical realities that do create a common bond within a shared geographic space. And, it is obvious, she thoroughly enjoys the process.
Hadad becomes the surrogate for Mexican and women´s cultures. By juxtaposing contradictory discourses on her body and her stage, in her lyrics and her private life, she performs both the continuity of stereotypical roles and a critical analysis of them. Her show, Cartas a Dragoberta, demonstrates that process. Hadad begins by reading letters exchanged between a couple now separated due to the woman´s search for fulfillment. In the exchange, the man, left alone in Mexico City, laments that Dragoberta just won´t stay at home like a good woman should. He’s not at all sympathetic to her complaints of the mistreatment she experiences as a woman traveling alone in the provinces of late 19th-century Mexico. He feels no pity; she exhibits no desire to change her plans. As Hadad delivers the lines, she puts on a large, amusing moustache, like those from 19th century popular performance. The detachable moustache, in a pop-Freudian reading, metonymically represents the phallus. With this prop she both appropriates and parodies the acquisition of "the power of the word" that dominates all official discourse in Mexico, be it religious, social, or political. In the Mexican context, it evokes former President Salinas de Gortari, or the macho figure par excellence, Pancho Villa, or any other authoritarian figure. On a woman, the moustache appears unnatural, a manly characteristic that can even create a freakish aspect, like that of a circus woman (Nigro “Inventions,” 145 ). By employing the moustache in her monologues, Hadad visually reenacts the arbitrary and theatrical aspects of gender construction in Mexican culture. Masculine control of the word/power is an element shared by all the cultures and societies that comprise Mexico, although some progress has been made, with varying degrees of success, in the empowerment of women across the Mexican cultural scapes. Recent examples include the visibility of women as leaders in the Zapatista insurgent movement and the increased presence of women in political office, including the naming of a woman as mayor of Mexico City. Dragoberta´s voice embodies the resistant traces that Hadad seeks to tease out of cultural registers. Although in official histories it might be rare to find examples of women who, like Dragoberta, do speak out in their own voices, Hadad sings their tunes, so to speak, and judging by the audience´s response, she does that well.
An important source of inspiration for Hadad has been the pioneer of vernacular song in Mexico, Lucha Reyes. Reyes (1904-1944) appeared on the Mexican musical scene in the 1930s where she introduced a bravía (deep, gutsy) style of singing–a feminine interpretation of ranchera music (Márquez). According to Dueñas, the singer's form of expression emerged from the "female soldiers of the Mexican Revolution, prototypes of the tough people in the countryside, especially certain female characters that [Reyes] portrayed in cantinas" (in Ramírez 23). Considered by some a femme fatale, for others Reyes personified a strong woman who takes responsibility for, and claims as her own, her sexuality, her economic well-being, her career, her public and private identities. In a country where the citizens are criticized and criticize themselves for their often "sheepish acceptance of authority, their capacity for meekness and manageableness" (Cazés)–a characteristic traced to Mexico's Indigenous, Hispanic, and Roman Catholic roots–Reyes was and still offers a model of resistance for both men and women.
The similarities between Hadad and Reyes´ public and private lives did not escape Hadad, who researched in depth the truths of Reyes’ life and consequences of her transgressive choices. Hadad's "fatal attraction" (in her words) to Reyes' almost mythical figure, and her incorporation of pieces of Reyes' life and work into her performances reflect her desire to resignify female historical figures and elements of traditional Mexican culture. Similar to Chicanas' work with the figure of La Malinche (often referred to as the Mexican Eve), Hadad teases out the ironies and ambiguities in their images, histories, and myths, and cites them literally on her body and stage. Drawing upon Kristeva´s thoughts, in The Explicit Body in Performance Rebecca Schneider suggests that “To render the symbolic literal is to disrupt and make apparent the fetishistic prerogatives of the symbol by which a thing, such as a body or a word, stands by convention for something else. To render literal is to collapse symbolic space” (6).
For Hadad, this process of recuperation and representation is both personal and artistic. She seeks modes of articulation of the psychological and corporal manifestations of sexuality repressed but not eliminated, of femaleness circumscribed but not eradicated. The dedication accompanying her album !Ay! reads: Thank you my Virgin for performing the miracle of permitting me to mold my contradictions of being Mexican, Mayan, and Lebanese into this recording, Heavy Nopal; a crucible into which I mix the heap of experiences that we Mexicans are” reads her Hadad´s body becomes the crucible upon which she performs the experiment of reformulation. She takes the myriad elements used to construct history, myth, and, consequently, identity, society, and nation, and rearranges them. She alters the syntax to produce new narratives that compliment and contradict, and thereby, come closer to representing lived experiences. She notes: I express the myriad contradictions which we are, all the variations on character and personality, moods and moments that define us and in which we exist. If there is a contradiction between the words of the songs I sing and what happens on stage, it is because we are that contradiction. (in Beltrán)
Through her research and on her stage, Hadad interrogates the ways in which we know history, and how its official version becomes the cornerstone for constructing a social consciousness. Through her use of the languages of the stage and the body (two spaces which conflate in her productions), she demonstrates how that stone can be removed and reused in the process of reconfiguring of self and community. In her work and her life, Hadad demands an open reading of that identity-in-process and urges others, women and men, to do the same. But not all contradictions are good or equal, and neither is society´s view or treatment of them. It depends on whose contradiction it is, where it is located, and with whose truth or law it is in conflict. The song Mata, Dios perdona (Kill, God Forgives) on her CD Corazón sangrante (Bleeding Heart, 1995) encapsulates the voluminous history of man´s manipulation of Man´s and God´s truths. Mata, Dios perdona traces man´s invention of rules and regulations, wrapped up in myth and religion–all of which affect women and other disenfranchised groups in quantitatively and qualitatively different ways. In this three-and-one-half minute recording, Hadad scans history for the genocides, crimes of passion, and mindless homicides that slide by the most basic Judeo-Christian mandate, Thou Shall Not Kill. In her interpretation of historical fact, she locates the “convenient” rationalizations used to excuse breaking this rule, and implicates the individuals and institutions complicit in what she sees as hypocrisy:
Fear not the path. Tread steadily on. Have no qualms about what they might say.
If you see a student peace march, mow ´em down! Those delinquents and gays.
Just kill! God forgives, Just kill! God forgives.
Once a great conquistador was told by his confessor, ´Slaughtering Indians is fine if God knows in time.´ Since Justice smiles on those who kill, why are we waiting?
Let´s feel the thrill! Kill, kill, kill...
Fear not the path, Tread steadily on. Have no qualms about what they might say.
Are your neighbor´s lands richer than yours? Blow his head off with UN approval.
Just kill! God always forgives, Just kill! God always forgives.
As she performs this song, Hadad’s hips undulate, her mass of thick, long black hair swings sensually over exposed shoulders leading the rest of her body and our gaze through its entrancing movements. Her small five-ringed hand brandishes a pistol as shiny as her bracelets and large earrings that sparkle like her green and red glitter eye shadow. Suddenly one realizes that she´s caught the spectator somewhere between the hypnotic rhythms and her biting yet cynical response not only to the evil and violence but to the past and present impunity rampant not only in Mexico but throughout the world. The image of the sensual figure of Hadad performing God´s forgiveness conjures up the one of Salomé offering up the head of John the Baptist. And the spectator is not a mere observer. The seductive Caribbean salsa rhythms of the music allows none to escape. Somewhat like a priestess leading her own ritual ceremony, Hadad, in the act of empowering herself to access the pleasures of her “flesh,” authorizes her audience to do the same. She focuses on this desire and experienced pleasure just long enough to hold one there viscerally until, suddenly, a line of the lyrics shakes one out of the corporal into an intellectual moment, sometimes so unexpectedly that the contradiction or contrast causes a jolt of laughter.
While often highlighting themes as the madness and vanity fabricated and marketed globally by voracious capitalistic appetites, Hadad’s performances also provide insight into Mexican culture and society under the influence of global capitalism and exchange. Mexico´s middle and working classes have suffered severe economic stress under the weight of the 1994 NAFTA agreement. The air never dirtier, the poor seldom more disenfranchised, street violence at its most visible in recent memory, worker and indigenous rights as precarious as ever, Mexico, ironically, appears to be more democratic than ever. Appears is the operative word in the ongoing battle for interpretive power.
Hadad represents these struggles onstage where we see bleeding hearts, the Statue of Liberty, giant foam cacti, chili peppers, computers, and multi-breasted goddesses. The Mother of the Aztec gods, Coatlicue, and the mother of Mexico´s disenfranchised, the Virgin of Guadalupe circulate with María Magdelena´s crying eyes and the flames of hell, empty tequila bottles, and condoms. She dons a headdresses containing everything from a miniature Statue of the Angel of Independence with crazed soccer fans partying at her feet, to the dome of Mexico´s Stock Market, basketball hoops, and the tree of life from the Aztec codices, here decorated with the faces of international political leaders and a string of blinking Christmas lights. When asked about the creative process of designing these objects and costumes and composing the shows, Hadad explains that “In some instances I have the words to the songs first, in others an idea for a dress, and in still others, everything is planned together, the costumes and the music. Sometimes the songs don´t have anything to do with a ´theme´...it´s what I feel like singing about, songs that I feel like singing” (PI). Her music draws from a broad variety of styles: Mexican rancheras, and corridas, romantic boleros, samba, bossa nova, pop music, Caribbean beats, tango, the blues, to tunes from Broadway shows. The adjective eclectic only begins to describe the myriad sources and styles of her sets and props. The materials from which many of these are made add another layer of signification: inexpensive and ephemeral foam rubber. In some cases, the foam rubber adds to the exaggeration of the parodic moment, as is the case of the foam rubber female breasts featured in several of her costumes. In others, ironic tones are sharpened, as in her homage to the Aztec goddess Coatlicue. For that, Hadad puts on a feminine black skirt composed of replicas of the skulls and snakes worn by the goddess in Mexico´s National Museum of Anthropology. Larger foam skulls protrude like guns on a cowboy´s holster, a mariachi sombrero tops her head, her back flanked by huge foam green cactus leaves. In contrast is the hardness of the metal of the small brass heart that adorns her chest. It is reminiscent of the milagros used by the faithful to give thanks, except it is lighted with a pulsating red glow like Jesus´ sacred bleeding heart–a parody of the kitschy commercialization of religious objects so much a part of popular culture. Similarly, the lightness of the foam rubber permits here to dance around as she “performs” the lyrics of songs about love and passion, the icons of power, faith, harsh landscape she dons form part of Mexican culture and folklore that cement national identity. Finally, the ephemeral nature of these foam rubber icons is not lost on some, nor is the fact that the inexpensiveness of the foam rubber makes the creation of these elaborate costumes possible in the tight Mexican economy.
Similar irony and parody structure what is perhaps Hadad’s most performed and well-known show, Heavy Nopal, various versions of which have travelled around the world. In this performance, Hadad emerges from a backstage mist onto a stage decorated with large foam-rubber reproductions of the cactus typical of Mexico´s semi-arid and desert landscape (cactus is found in official symbols like the national flag as well as in Hollywood caricatures of Mexico). Although she´s dressed in her beautiful Virgin skirt, her accessories and makeup evoke an image certainly not of the Virgin/Mother type but of a woman transgressively comfortable with her body and sexuality. Hadad further complicates the already dense accumulation of signs. She makes her entrance hobbling on crutches, arm in a sling and head covered with a large bandage. Initially in a low, pained voice she sings: “You beat me so last night and still I can´t leave you,” “Beat me, abuse me, but just don´t leave me.” The image transcends cultural and linguistic frontiers. Each of the four times I have seen this segment (three in Mexico City, once in Miami) the response was the same: the audience goes wild with laughter, at first. I discovered in conversations, however, that many spectators vacillated between glee and sorrow, a sense of distance and involvement, as they witnessed the disturbing image of a woman unabashedly admitting to her dependency, to her complicity in her own abuse. The history of domestic violence this scene embodies, and the fear and weakness of the victim that it quotes, cannot be joked away. Hadad makes explicit the manner by which the consequence of lack of action or resolve perpetuate the crime. She implicates seemingly innocuous lyrics of popular songs in the perpetuation of social attitudes that bring communal denial and prevent intervention in domestic violence. Through her use of the languages of the stage, Hadad literalizes the lyrics of old popular songs that Mexicans, men and women alike, sing with gusto at parties, family gatherings, and other social functions. Music and dance in Mexico, in that sense, are truly democratic cultural elements as they are shared across generations, social and economic classes, and genders (except, one can argue, some indigenous communities). In that way, these songs participate in the creation of Mexico’s imagined community even (and perhaps more so) as the influx of foreign, particularly U.S. products assault local markets and patterns of behavior. By engaging the crowd in a practice in which they (Mexicans) participate frequently, Hadad implicates them in the violence inherent in the underlying belief systems and mechanisms of such cultural practices. Our laughter, our pleasure, become suspect too. Although the tone is very humorous, the message is transparent and indisputable: these traditions–the songs and the realities to which they implicitly or explicitly make reference–write themselves violently across women´s real, material bodies.
Another contradiction that Hadad takes on is her own and other Mexicans’ relationship with their homeland, characterized by frustration bordering on cynicism (due to the eternal state of crisis and corruption) and by love and admiration (due to its rich cultural and social heritage and the beauty of the character of the people). Despite her pointed criticism and disgust at times, there is, she explains, no other place she would rather live. “The smells, colors, sounds of Mexico never cease to seduce and nourish me” (PI). This ambiguous relationship is evoked in her show and costume La multimamada. Mamada in Mexico loosely translates as either suckle (mamar is to suckle), or an exaggeration or stupidity, or, a more vulgar use, a blow-job (although this last street-use has never been mentioned by Astrid, it nonetheless exists in vernacular lexicon). Multimamada, then, suggests mass suckle or mass stupidity. The inspiration for the costume is Isis, the goddess of nourishment, portrayed in several cultures as a goddess of multiple breasts. Hadad translates the concept into a skirt covered with foam rubber life-sized breasts with pronounced dark nipples. Miniature caricatures of Mexican types dangle from several of the breasts, each marked by his clothing, such as a politician or business man, a blue-collar worker. Hanging from the breasts, their macho egos seem deflated, converting them into the macho who, despite his bravado, can´t wean himself off his mother´s breast. Made of foam rubber, the breasts are fabricated version, like old-style falsies, many made of the same material. The female breast is represented as a masculine fetish that propels advertising and marketing sales throughout the 20th century, with no sign of vanishing in the 21st, indicated in part by the booming business of breast implants. Also caught in the entanglement of meanings is Mexicans´ relationship to their Mother/Motherland. While placing the Mother on a pedestal, she figures in one of the strongest curses in Mexican Spanish: Chinga tu madre, screw or fuck your mother. While defending Mexico in some instances, throughout the nation’s history its elite looked elsewhere for “high culture” and civilization (Paris was often the site of envy). One often hears Mexicans say somewhat jokingly, somewhat seriously that only imported goods are of quality. The attitude or concept is referred to as malinchismo, taken from la Malinche, Hernán Cortes´s Indian mistress, translator, and advisor who is written into history as a traitor. Hadad offers still another take on the paradox of Mother/Motherland, a concept at the center of her show Multimamada:
My idea was to speak of the chaos that we were living at that moment. […] To speak of the chaos. I had to speak about the mythical idea that everything in the past was better. Another lie. And so I thought about Isis, who is known as the many breasted goddess. I wanted to transport her to La República Mexicana, the Republic of Mexico, to the motherland, the madre patria that is always there for everyone, that never dries up. It doesn’t matter how much we suck, it doesn’t matter how much we rape her, we exploit her, how much we take, how many thousands die, she keeps giving, and giving, and giving.” (PI)
This giving Mother, whose body provides for everyone, contrasts with la tequilera, the strong, loud, tequila-swigging woman of Hadad´s signature song. La tequilera claims her sexuality and body as her own, available for her pleasure. She cries out that she’d rather die alone than compromise herself. On Hadad’s body-stage, the either-or binary oppositions (Mother/whore, evil/pure, suffering/libertine) recast themselves as spaces in which various seemingly incompatible characteristics coexist. She performs this rearrangement in many of her creations, making obvious the processes of identity construction on the individual and national level. She offers herself as a model by demonstrating explicitly another way to be.
Astrid strikes even closer to the heart of Mexican culture (Indigenous, Hispanic, and Catholic) as she explodes the virgin/whore binary and ridicules the Church´s paternalism and hypocrisy. Pecadora (Sinful Woman) focuses on the characterization of women as innately evil beings that can and must be redeemed for their and society´s well-being. For this, she summons the figure of María Magdelena, the quintessential pecadora, used by the Church to exemplify the repentant and thus saved fallen woman. Hadad maps her version onto her body: her dress´s skirt is covered with some thirty-three large red foam rubber hearts (the foam creating a three-dimensionality), each with an eye (large black pupils against bright whites); yellow flames frame the top, simultaneously evoking Christ´s bleeding heart and looking like bright hair or eyelashes. Connected to an elaborate electrical and water system, some both light up and emit tears. Her bodice is a black corset, and her waist is framed by a bright red feather boa. Pecadora is a piece in which, the performer confesses, “the dress, the song, the image of Mary Magdalena, and my personal life all came together. […] She was a generous woman with a impressive futuristic vision, and so the hearts with eyes are this vision toward the future. Also, María Magdalena was a woman and we know that she cried. That´s why Laurencio Ruiz and I designed the Tree of Life headpiece from Aztec códices, which functioned as a sombrero with eyes that light up. I had just finished writing the song for a tango, Amar amarga (To Love Bitterly) because I was involved in a passion, rather conflictive, at the time. […]. The name ´María´ means to love bitterly. Magdalena means a magnificent tower, or also the prisoner, the guilty one.” (PI) The Catholic Church’s version differs. They portray María Magdelena as a weak, sinful, seductive, and dangerous daughter of Eve. By recognizing her sins and repenting, she achieved salvation. She becomes the perfect model for all women considered dangerous by patriarchal institutions: orphans, widows, abandoned wives, prostitutes, actresses, single women. In Mexico, for hundreds of years, portraits of Magdelena hung in women´s prisons, sanctuaries and reformatories to scare the female inmates into believing that the remedy to perdition consisted of total submission to the Father in all his manifestations. Hadad´s María Magdelena, however, thinks, sees, feels, loves passionately and generously, and doesn´t seem likely to buckle under the Church´s weight any time soon. The intimate space of the body becomes simultaneously a site of domination and of resistance and transgression, but not of the guilt so much a part of the Catholic perspective of the human condition; there´s always guilt. It´s always present, no matter how you free yourself, how liberated you think you are, because it´s what they gave you when you were a child and it is very difficult to rid yourself of it. It´s not totally useless as long as it´s not an obsession. Not feeling it, well, that´s the problem of our governmental leaders, they feel no element of guilt at all, that´s why their cynicism is unusual, so strange.” (PI) .
In her exploration of the interior and exterior of Self, Hadad consistently makes her way back to Official Mexican Culture. Availing herself of postmodern parody that at once reproduces and admires that which it criticizes, Hadad utilizes and mocks the official rhetoric and symbolic systems used by the Mexican power structures as part of the colonization process and, since the late 19th century, as part of a strategy of nation-building, of constructing national identity. Highlighted in this rhetoric is the appeal to "good" Mexicans that is inscribed in the symbol of the Mexican flag and in the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Both are invoked in one of her favorite costumes, her Virgin skirt. It consists of a full-length skirt of six large scarves sewn together, each adorned with the image of the Virgin Mary that in Mexico is dominated by the color scheme of the red, white, and green of the Mexican flag. Unlike other versions of the Virgin, whose cloak commonly is sky blue, Mexico´s Virgin dons a green cloak with yellow stars; she seems to be supported by a cherub at her feet whose wings, instead of angel white, are red, white, and green. The nation´s political and religious soul are conflated in this image, love of one implies adoration of (and obedience to) the other. The power and legitimacy of the nation (and its leading fathers) is located in the divine. The emotional power of the Virgin of Guadalupe’s image is not to be underestimated; the cult of the Virgin and the outpouring of faith is by any measure impressive and moving. One only need to witness the outpouring of love and dedication demonstrated by the thousands of faithful who visit her Basilica in Mexico City–some completing pilgrimage on foot from hundreds of miles away. The Virgin is one of the few icons in Mexico of which any perceived “desecration” or mockery is considered sacrilegious and usually not tolerated (while, at the same time, she graces commercial products as non-religious as beach towels and t-shirts). Hadad´s Virgin costume was censored when she was invited to appear on national television, a medium with close ties to the seventy-year ruling party, the PRI . Further underscoring the elites´ recognition of the power of image, so much a part of Mexico´s systems of social control–and the resistance to it–, is the fact that the PRI has a legal monopoly on the colors of the flag. No other political party can use the red, white, and green in their logo. During the decade of the 1990s, cries for democratic change have included the call for the “release” of the colors of the Mexican flag.
Censorship of Hadad´s work has been minimal, though it has surfaced in various forms. Although her Virgin of Guadalupe skirt and her Multimamada costumes were censored (the latter considered pornographic), she has appeared numerous times on Mexican and other Latin American mainstream TV. She was filmed by MTV´s Latin American show, and continually tours in Europe (France, Spain, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, England, Portugal, Belgium), the U.S., Australia, and throughout South America, in such diverse places as Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia, and Brazil. Her music, recorded on compact disks and cassettes, sells around the world. She has been featured in prestigious international theatre festivals. Her broad acceptance does not include (or has been slow to develop), however, approval by many Mexican and other Latin American theatre elites who cringe at the idea of their works appearing in the same venue as Hadad´s. To cite an example of another type of censorship, on several occasions invitations for Hadad to represent Mexico at international festivals never arrived. The protocol for official invitations is handled institution to institution. On various occasions, those in charge decided not to forward invitations to her and, instead, sent other performers in her place. She remains undaunted, however. She understands that certain responses to her work (calling it frivolous) form part of a long tradition in Mexico of rejection of so-called low culture by high cultural elites. The system of patronage that functions within official cultural institutions has its own long history.
Hadad has, in general, demonstrated a strong resistance to censorship of her freedoms as an artist, a woman, and a Mexican. After a performnance in San Francisco in July, 1994, a group of feminists levied harsh criticism, questioning the politics of a female performer who flaunts her body—a marked body, according to them, with no chance of recuperation in existing systems of representation. Hadad replied sharply, maintaining that her performance must be situated and analyzed within its Mexican context. To attempt to force such choices upon a work for it to considered feminist, Hadad insists, reveals a position as authoritarian as the systems she attempts to dismantle (PI).
Such negative reactions, however, are the exception. Hadad carefully constructs a space of encounter for her audiences, and the spectators in her often packed houses respond in overwhelmingly positive ways, as evidenced by the thunderous applause, the in-motion bodies, and the hoots and hollers of pleasure. The complicity between Hadad and the spectator, a relationship which enhances solidarity among the various groups represented in the audience. Rosa Beltán notes "the wink of an eye in which she becomes the iconic referent of our national symbols as she interprets, to the letter, the songs to which we Mexicans usually cry with more pleasure" (17). Through this solidarity, Hadad seeks to create a sense of community and motivate social participation that might spill over into the public sphere. Laughter becomes a release of the frustration Mexicans experience when they, as individuals, feel powerless to change systems operated by those whose calls for "democracy" and "plurality" prove to be another exercise in public theatricality.
Reading or evaluating the effects of art is complex, and important questions remain as we consider Hadad´s work. Is her performance, in spite of her intentions, received by the audience as commercial entertainment empty of the power to begin the process of social and political transformation? Does her show simply generate voyeurism and the male-gaze that resists rupture while recreating and reinscribing the very systems it sets out to criticize? Do the elements of popular culture, decontextualized and then recontextualized on her cabaret stage, especially in the setting of the La Bodega in the Colonia Condesa of Mexico City, become Mexican kitschBa bad imitation that, in the end, turns into folklore or commercializes popular Mexican culture without ever assigning it value as a "valid" art form?
I suggest that the answer may partially be found in one of the motivating forces in Hadad´s (and, similarly, other Chicana, Latina, and Mexican women's) work—that of recycling and reinterpreting the very images, forms, and spaces which have constructed the categories of female and, by extension, national identity. The figure of the Mexican Diva of the early 20th century, with her sensuality, sexuality, passion, and demands for social, artistic, and economic autonomy continues to inspire. A new generation of scholars and artists is reviviving, studying, and re-situating the Diva in Mexican history—a point of departure for Mexicans in the process of constructing identities which enable them to respond to their lived experiences.
The questions raised here are neither rhetorical or frivolous, as Mexico´s ongoing economic and social crises make clear. Our work as critics has required the same kind of rethinking and reinterpretation that Hadad proposes. Implicit in that process is the task of locating what traces of the past linger in the present and devising strategies to move more humanly toward the future. We continually develop critical paradigms capable of reading art and artists within their particular context and historical moment. Perhaps the questions we ask will permit us to expand the field of inquiry to be more inclusive of the full range of issues at stake. In the meantime, we can enjoy the pleasure of the spectacles Astrid Hadad creates as well as the challenges of their analysis.


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Notes

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