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Crossing the Border with
Chabela Vargas
A Chicana Femme's Tribute
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano
Chabela Vargas's heyday in Mexico came in the first half of the 1960s, in
the "bohemian" atmosphere of clubs frequented by established and future
cultural patriarchs of the Mexican intelligentsia.
At the same time that she was idolized for her passionate interpretation of Mexican and Latin American popular song, she cut a scandalous figure because of her performance of her out lesbianism. Anecdotes abound of her flamboyant "entrances" on motorcycles and in sports cars and her blatant flirting with women in the audience. She was ultimately blacklisted because of her so-called obscene behavior.
In 1993, at the age of seventy-four, Chabela Vargas rode the crest of a second comeback in Spain referred to as "El chavelazo" (Chabela-mania), enjoying the adoration of a third generation of Spanish fans: "She left the public joyfully transported, with faint pulses and in a cathartic state." as ABC wrote. She recorded two albums during her seven-recital tour, making the contemporary scene in the company of queer director Pedro Almodóvar, whose filmmaking esthetic includes using popular Mexican songs. The reports of the tour in the Spanish press add fuel to this avid femme's fantasies, aiding in the imaginative re-creation of Chabela's stage persona. Undaunted by the punishment meted out for her blatant public sexuality in the 1960s, Chabela opened her recital in Madrid with a provocative double entendre, declaring her tireless dedication to "musical" passions: "When you like something, you should do it all night long."
"Sitio for me"
In her public lesbian identification and performance style, singer Chabela Vargas creates a space for a U.S. Latina lesbian reading within Mexican and Latin-American popular music. Chabela Vargas allows me to participate in different ways in a form of popular culture that is at once dearly beloved, because of the emotional response and pleasures it evokes, and alienating, because of the (hetero)sexism of its lyrics, and the heterosexual public spaces of its bailes. Because of her public sexual positioning as a lesbian, Chabela Vargas appropriates or undermines many of the gendered subject positions in Mexican popular songs, even as she illuminates how impossible it is to conceive of the Mexican/Chicana lesbian identities and desires completely outside these culturally specific imaginings about men and women, masculinity and feminity. Although Latina lesbians have always had their own favorite fantasies, Chabela Vargas, as a publicly identified lesbian, creates what Emma Pérez calls sitio for me within the Mexican popular music, a space/place for my mestiza lesbian subjectivity, desire, and sexuality. Vargas's recordings, photographs, and performances, passed around among Latinas in the United States, have caused lesbian images and an oral lesbian history to merge into the mythic highway of Mexican popular culture. The inventive playfulness of these stories interests me more than their "veracity" or "accuracy" in the conventional historical sense.
Neither dress nor skirt
Chabela Vargas has recorded more than eighty albums. I am proposing a limited reading of four of her albums with Orfeón, whose commodification of the singer is marked by ambivalence and contradiction. In the liner notes, in tandem with the cover photos, Orfeón appears anxious to reconcile two aspects of its presentation of Chabela Vargas, that are radically at odds: her "difference" and her emblematic status as "the most symbolic interpreter" of the sentimental Mexican soul. Even a cursory glance at the images of her on the covers of these records establishes an incontrovertible fact: femme she's not.
None of the four photos shows Chabela in a dress or a skirt. On her first album, Noche bohemia (Bohemian night), she is wearing the garb adopted by many in the bohemian scene affiliated with the folklore movement: the poncho and the huaraches of the male Mexican Indian, rather than feminine-gendered apparel. The marketing strategy here also appeals to those who want something "raro" or "different", coded in the reference to the nocturnal and bohemian atmosphere of the clubs. The notes on Noche bohemia call attention to Chabela's face and stance: "a woman with an intensely interesting face, very hieratic, but full of life behind her mask of apparent indifference."
The butch image on her second album, Hacia la vida (toward life), consists of the hairstyle, the baby-blue shirt, and, in particular, that certain posture with the cigarette from the repertory of butch self-styling that signal erotic capabilities. At the same time, her butch darkness in the photograph engages my desire as a mestiza femme. Consumption of this image provides both femmes and butches what Valerie Traub calls "erotic identifications", meaning a sense of self as erotic subject or object. The liner notes" references to her "strong personality" and how she "lives for her public" are richly ironic, in light of the anecdotal performance tradition I referred to earlier.
The image on the third album, Chavela Vargas, food for many a fantasy, is a close-up of her face and hand, shirt buttoned at the throat (no skin visible). The photo even looks like it could be on a package of cigarettes, closely identifies her with the smoking culture that permeates Mexican popular music and its marketing. Here the erotic signifier of the cigarette is accompanied by the short fingernails. Her hand rests on the guitar, traditionally the sexualized female body upon which the heterosexual male lover plays. Taken together, the short nails so near the guitar amount to an erotic advertisement of butch sexual expertise. Orfeón makes explicit the marketing strategy of the second album: what is unique and strange can also be "exclusive", accessible only to "those privileged ones who know how to appreciate Chabela Vargas's unique and strange style".
On La original Chavela Vargas, from the early 1970s, she takes on the stature of a veritable Latin American monument, through camera angle, upturned positioning of the chin and face, and the red Peruvian-style ruana that covers her body. It is this strong, handsome Chabela that we see in the Spanish press photos, twenty years later. Again, the monumentalizing impulse in her presentation as interpreter of "the most profound and deep-rooted sentiment of the people" fails to jibe entirely with the emphasis on her unique style. The "strangeness" of Chabela Vargas's style is consistently explained in the liner notes in terms of her voice and her idiosyncratic interpretations, although "certain" readers are expected to read between the lines to her "other" difference. Chabela Vargas uses her voice and her body to express marginalized lesbian desire and longing, sexual giving and taking, delight and suffering, seduction and rejection. This unsettled, coded, but undeniable connection between her interpretations and her physicality (the unique vocal technique to infuse emotions into the songs, her body in performance) must be turned comfortingly back to the realm of musicianship. The startling conflation of Chabela Vargas as "hallmark of Mexico" and butch-desiring subject is quite satisfying, for it includes lesbian subjectivity within the definition of what is considered "authentically" Mexican.
"Put your hand here"
There is a way in which just the public knowledge of Vargas's lesbianism suffices for this femme listener/viewer to appropriate the entire repertory of songs Chabela sings for lesbian desire. Certainly, many songs are susceptible to lesbian readings because of the lack of gendered pronouns. It is precisely in the play of the pronouns that the most radical appropriations are made; they are key to the ways certain listeners are included and others excluded. Chabela Vargas's most transgressive interventions are those in which the voice of the song is either unmarked or identified as male, and the object of desire is marked as female in the text. Because traditionally such songs have been sung by male singers, in these texts, Chabela Vargas dons a kind of musical drag, writing / speaking / singing lesbian desire through the butch appropriation of the active heterosexual male subject position. Such texts, in which the object of desire is marked as "she", are open to lesbian and male heterosexual readings but limit female heterosexual or gay male identifications. I want to illustrate this with a musical text, "Macorina", which sings of erotic nocturnal encounters.
Macorina
Put your hand here, Macorina
Put your hand here. (2x)
Your feet left the mat
And your skirt escaped
Seeking the boundary
On seeing your slender waist
The sugar canes threw
Themselves down along the way
For you to grind
As if you were a mill.
Put your hand ...
Your breasts, soursop fruit
Your mouth a blessing
Of ripe guanabana
And your slender waist
Was the same as that dance
Put your hand ...
Then the dawn
That takes you from my arms
And I not knowing what to do
With that woman scent
Like mango and new cane
With which you filled me at
The hot sound of that dance.
Put your hand ...
The insistent refrain of "Macorina" is "put your hand here, Macorina, put your hand here". Of course the answer to the question "where?" depends on the body of the speaking/singing subject, heterosexual male or butch lesbian. In performance, Chabela Vargas would engage the gaze of a woman in the audience and put her hand on her own crotch when singing this line. This claiming of the spaces of Mexican popular music for the female/lesbian sexual body is given highly erotic charge by the lyrics of the song. Sensual images of tropical fruits and sugar cane associating the female body with certain tastes, forms, and smells are cast definitively into the realm of the sexual through the image of the sugar cane throwing themselves down for her to "grind". The song gets away with this in part through the articulation between having sex and dancing (the references to "aquel danzòn"). The voluptuous inventory of the female body, with its movement, fragrances, and ripe flavors, generates a lot of heat.
Only hearing Chabela Vargas can clarify the articulations among her body (including her voice), the intensity of her emotional register, lesbian desire, and erotic style. Musically, her iconoclasm consists of extreme contrasts in tempo and volume and the artful manipulation of the whole range of the human voice: Whispers, cries, growls, laughs, shouts, and murmurs of desire. These unexpected surges create an effect of excess that disrupts the conventional level of the lyrics, opening the music to other readings, and other pleasures.
Chabela's music has seen me through good times and bad times, and for this gift I offer her my tribute. On the earphones, entre las girlfriends, and in my fantasies, she makes a cherished repertory of Mexican and Latin American music uniquely mine.
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano is Associate Professor of Spanish at Stanford
University, specializing in sexuality studies on both Mexican and U.S. Latino
literature and culture.
This is a shortened version of her article, published in "Sex and Sexuality in Latin America", ed. By Daniel Balderston and Donna J. Guy, New York University Press.