In a public square in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas a
masked, robed figure appears in front of a makeshift proscenium. To
a casual observer, this figure looks like a Spanish missionary from
the 16th century. It actually represents the Mayan Earth Lord, in a play
about the origins of the Zapatista uprising, staged by a local Mayan
theatre troupe. The play has also been staged in the Lacandon jungle and
for crowds of international observers in the now-halted peace talks. A
translation appears in American Anthropologist.
1
--------
In the patio of an office/school/daycare center a few blocks from
the same square, a Mayan woman, costumed as a bricklayer, upbraids her
"wife" for not being properly submissive, in a play concerned with the
effects on rural families and communities of Mexico's economic reforms. A
photo essay on the center's founders and their theatre appears in the
28 September 1997 issue of the New York Times.
2
--------
In a field in Oxolotán, Tabasco, a dark figure appears
on the horizon, on horseback. As it draws near, its features slowly become
clearer: it is Death, costumed in the tradition of the Mexican Day of the
Dead. It takes the place of the Moon in García Lorca's Blood
Wedding, in an outdoor adaptation of this work by an indigenous
theatre troupe in Tabasco. Scenes from this production, recorded by
Mexican photographer Lourdes Grobet, appear in a coffee table book, a
travel guide to Tabasco, and on the World Wide Web.3[End Page 349]
--------
In a basketball court outside an elementary school in the
Yucatán peninsula, an insect-like figure covered in candy
wrappers and soda cans attacks a group of farmers. It is called the
"Modern Locust," and it appears in a play about the benefits of
community autonomy in the face of encroaching global markets. Presented
hundreds of times throughout the Peninsula, and published in an anthology
of work by Mexican indigenous playwrights, the work remains virtually
unknown outside of Mexico.4
--------
Each of these examples comes from a different region of what I would call
Mayan Mexico. Each participates in the relatively recent emergence of
theatrical performance in southern Mexico aimed at proclaiming and/or
preserving Mayan culture. Each stakes a claim to a kind of "active
ethnicity" in the service of Mayan communities. At the same time, each
arose out of some degree of collaboration between Mayan writers and
performers and non-Mayan artists and researchers. And each supplies
a complex note in the register of cultural politics in Mexico, where
emerging democracy and neoliberal economic "reforms" have created new
tensions between the Mexican state and its indigenous subjects--often
with violent results.
5
In this environment, claims to cultural
identity carry high stakes, as multiple discourses with as many agendas
seek to "fix" Mexican national and Mayan cultural identity in
terms relative to each other. In this essay, I suggest that for these
Mayan communities theatre acts as an important and ongoing intervention
in these discursive practices, negotiating a shifting position among
competing calls of nostalgia and progress, authenticity and hybridity,
identity and identifications.
Discursive Practices and Mayan Cultural Identity
My title paraphrases that of a foundational text in the "invention"
of Mayan culture: John L. Stephens's Incidents of Travel in Central
America, Chiapas, and Yucatan.
6
This account, originally
published in 1841 and still in wide circulation, is filled
with
[End Page 350]
descriptions of the fantastic pyramid ruins that Stephens
encountered in his travels and with speculative illustrations about life
during the times when these structures had been occupied. Its publication
fired the imagination (and desire) of Europe and the United States
for this "Mexican Egypt," and helped to inspire the influential
couple--anthropology and tourism--that has played a key part in its
ongoing invention and (re)construction.
As a participant, observer, and consumer of both anthropology and
tourism, I invoke Stephens's title to foreground the position of privilege
from which I speak. If these observations are finally informed by
the insights of recent postcolonial theory, they owe their origin to
the interest generated by the work of Stephens and others who produced
"Mayanness" for international consumption. Discussing this production and
consumption of identities, anthropologist Quetzil E. Castañeda
suggests that "Mayan culture" and "Mayan civilization" are "contested
terms that have no essential entity outside of the complex histories
of sociopolitical struggles." At the same time, they are "not at all
empty of meaning or reality."
7
Following Castañeda, I
use the terms in reference to "heterogeneous peoples and societies that
nonetheless shared certain religious, historical, aesthetic, social, and
linguistic forms in a geopolitical space called Mesoamerica."
8
Throughout Mayan Mexico there are regional differences in the ways the
people called Maya use the terms themselves.
9
But for all of
them, ethnic self-identification operates within a complex cultural
matrix of competing, complementary, and more-or-less official
discourses. The fields of anthropology and tourism, for example, tend
to construct the Maya as remnants of a lost civilization, whose glory days
are past and whose contemporary utility exists in their status as links to
that past--and in their ability to produce artisanal reminders of it. If
in these discourses the Maya become a kind of cultural "other," the legacy
of mestizaje, with its related policies of indigenismo,
has at the same time worked to construct the indigenous as some lost
aspect of an emerging Mexican "self."
From colonial times, Mayan cultural identity has been articulated within
Mexico's larger struggles for a national identity associated with this
key, if problematic, concept, and although it has come under serious
scrutiny in the past two decades, mestizaje still carries a
certain ideological weight in Mexican society, as does the "melting
pot" idea
[End Page 351]
in the United States. In this century, the legacy of
post-Revolutionary efforts to homogenize Mexico into a unified
and modern nation-state--one with "an Indian soul, a mestizo body,
and a civilized future"
10
--has been as "mixed" as the term
mestizaje itself suggests. If, on the one hand, indigenist programs
in the "new" Mexico drew attention to the indigenous past in art and
literature, it was (and is) also true that the living Maya have been
subject to ongoing programs aimed at assimilating them to the Mexican
imaginary--far more than they have been celebrated for their difference
from it, or appreciated as constituent forces of that imaginary in
anything but a cursory, romanticized way. Mexico's current economic
policies exacerbate this situation: Mayans are valued for providing
labor and products for Mexico's hoped-for global markets; they are
abused and often killed if, as Maya, they call for equity in
matters of land, health, education, nutrition, self-determination, and
representative democracy.
Nevertheless, while it can be persuasively argued that "Mayan culture"
is largely the result of discursive practices aimed at satisfying Western
desire or, later, constructing a post-Revolutionary Mexican nation-state
along Western models, it does not follow that the term is irrelevant for
the people so designated. As Jorge Klor de Alva summarizes their dilemma:
many "organic" or "native" intellectuals, swept up by the
poststructuralist/postmodern tide, are struggling to promote ethnic unity
and pride while paradoxically attempting to make out, in the transnational
ethnoscapes of their respective communities, nonessentialized patterns
of collective identity.
11
My contention is that, to varying degrees, each of the groups I mentioned
above attempts its own resolution to the problematic of autonomy
without marginalization, and collaboration without assimilation. For
defining something like "Mayan theatre" is as difficult as
finding a working definition of Mayan culture. For example:
if in a given theatrical production, "indigenous" elements co-exist
with "non-indigenous" elements, what motivates the combination, and who
has the power to do the combining? With what effects do these elements
interact--for the reification of "difference" in a neo-traditional
scheme, or, as Biodun Jeyifo writes of African theatre, toward "a
liberating and genuine artistic exploration of the range and diversity
of styles, techniques, paradigms and traditions available within both the
'foreign' and the 'indigenous?'"
12
Defining "foreign" as
against "indigenous" becomes even more complex when we remember that, in
the 1940s and 1950s, the Mexican government deployed traveling theatre
troupes throughout Mexico; these "cultural missions" were a key part of
Mexico's modernization plans and served to dramatize the prescribed new
ways of Mexican life to a largely illiterate countryside. Interestingly,
each of the troupes discussed herein owes some part of its existence
to that earlier theatrical
[End Page 352]
activity, and each has appropriated it
in some way to transform its intended legacy. Finally, what kinds of
considerations mediate the distinctions (however provisional) drawn above
between "indigenous" and "non-indigenous"? In their staged representation,
in their day-to-day operations, and in their critical reception, these
considerations might include gender and caste, but are not limited to
them. With these questions in mind, I return to the four figures I
mentioned at the beginning of this essay, which provide the points of
entry into a larger discussion of the work and workings of each group,
on-stage and off.
Mayan Theatre in Chiapas: Lo'il Maxil and La Fomma
The two self-identified Mayan theatre organizations that
have received perhaps the most attention, both within Mexico and
internationally, are based in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas,
the site of the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and the subsequent focus
of worldwide attention on the ongoing troubles in that southernmost
state.
13
Lo'il Maxil (Monkey Business) was formed in 1989
as the theatrical arm of Sna Jtz'Ibajom (House of the Writer), an
organization aimed at preserving and disseminating the Tzotzil and
Tzeltal Mayan languages spoken in the surrounding communities. The
group's theatrical activity actually began in 1985 with puppet plays,
partly because the father of founding members Juan and Antonio de la
Torre López had been a puppeteer in Rosario Castellanos's Teatro
Petul, and the puppets were still in the family. (Teatro Petul was part
of the "cultural mission" efforts of the 1940s and 1950s.) In 1993,
two former Lo'il Maxil actresses left the company and formed their own
organization, La Fomma, an acronym which signifies "Empowerment
of the Mayan Woman."
14
Like Sna Jtz'Ibajom, La Fomma offers
literacy programs and promotes the development of indigenous literature,
of which bilingual theatre forms a key part. Unlike Sna Jtz'Ibajom, the
focus of such theatre is almost exclusively the exploration of women's
lives in both rural and urban communities.
[End Page 353]
Lo'il Maxil currently has a repertoire of ten plays on
subjects ranging from local lore and myth to contemporary social
problems.
15
Although the focus of the group's efforts has been
the promotion of ethnic Mayan traditions, Lo'il Maxil works with several
non-Mayan artists both to seek funding and to assist in the artistic
development of its performances. An urban Mexican playwright and a
U.S. theatre director are responsible for dramaturgy and final
shaping of the troupe's collectively developed pieces, so that in
final production the work has been mediated by their decidedly
Western training and perspective--a perspective masked by the group's
actively ethnic public image, which, ironically, is itself controlled
to a large degree by these "outsiders." La Fomma has also worked with
non-Mayans for the purposes of artistic training and fundraising, but
less so in matters of creative control in the writing and direction
of individual performances. So, for different reasons, despite their
names and stated aims, both groups trouble easy classifications of
"Mayanness." To illustrate, I turn now to a discussion of the plays
in which the two figures first mentioned in this essay
appear--Lo'il Maxil's De todos para todos (From All, For
All), and La Fomma's Migración.
"Zapateatro:" De todos para todos
De todos para todos was created within a month after the Zapatista
uprising in 1994 and is among Lo'il Maxil's best known works. It has
been staged for a variety of audiences including rural communities and
international participants in the peace talks aborted in 1996. The
play, labeled a "tragicomedy" and dedicated to "the Mayan and Zoque
martyrs fallen in the wars of Chiapas,"
16
documents the
coming-to-consciousness of a rural community, displaced into the jungle
by the corruption of some local ladinos,
17
non-Mayan
landowners who have illegally forced them off their ancestral lands. It
is a dramatic analog of the Zapatista rebellion and its origins.
The ladinos--wearing the half-masks of the commedia
dell'arte tradition that the group's U.S. director, Ralph Lee,
often employs--are both comic and disturbing.
18
Feigning
goodwill, one ladino, Don Pompous, pays a friendly visit to
campesino Petul and his wife. His attitude hardens, however, when he
informs them he has written proof that their lands, which the family
has occupied for generations, in fact have belonged to his family
since colonial times. He demands to see the campesinos' "papers," which
he knows quite well do not exist. Confused, the campesino provokes the
following fact-bending outburst from Don Pompous:
[End Page 354]
You uppity indian! I am talking about the deed: because you all came
to invade these lands, without my family's permission, now you're going
to have to get off of them. I'm giving you one week's time to harvest
what you can, so you can see I'm honest folk.
19
The campesino's only possible recourse is to visit the local land
office, run by an official who was often played in the mask of
corrupt Mexican ex-president Carlos Salinas, depending on the performance
venue.
20
The role of this man's secretary is played by a man
in drag (echoing centuries of fiesta performances, in which female
parts are almost always played by men in order to lampoon them), with mask
and blonde wig. Neither man bothers to pay attention to the claim of the
campesino, who is interrupted by the arrival of Don Pompous. Although the
official admits to Don Pompous the legitimacy of the campesino's
claim, it is only so that he can secure a substantial bribe from Don
Pompous. Having thus "arranged their affairs," the official settles
the matter with Petul by offering him and the rest of the campesinos land
in the jungle. "Maybe it's because we can't read or write," Petul tells
the others, "but this is the only option they gave me."
21
Don
Pompous has added further incentive by sending out his "white guards,"
armed plantation employees who are legendary for terrorizing small
land-owners and pillaging their crops.
Once relocated in the jungle, the campesinos are foiled once again,
this time by the spirits of the animals who are angered by the
slash-and-burn agricultural methods threatening to displace them from
their own ancestral homes. Although the ecological message is serious,
the scenes are comic, as each of the animal spirits curries favor with
the Earth Lord, who responds by visiting an epidemic of dysentery on
the jungle community. The people attempt to intervene through a local
shaman but remain caught between the vengeance of the spirits and the
power of the ladinos, until one character, based on Subcomandante
Marcos, calls his compatriots to arms. Although he is educated in the
city and fluent in the "language of the oppressor," this character
is--unlike the real Marcos--clearly an authoritative member of the
community, capable of leading his compatriots to open rebellion.
The play's final moment points toward ongoing struggle, but also to
the unity of the people of Chiapas: "Viva the fight for indigenous
peoples!" is immediately followed by "Viva Chiapas!" which in turn is
followed by the Chiapas state anthem. But this moment can be reached
only after the leading campesina has fallen with the battle cry, "This
is a fight from all, for all! Even if it means shedding our blood,
we want our children to live with justice!"
22
With her death,
but before the battle can escalate into a full-fledged revolution,
the characters on stage freeze, and the Earth Lord intervenes with his
own plea:
Earth creatures! Stop this killing! Let no more blood be spilled! Don't
you see that you are all brothers? If you wish to live happily on Earth,
you must learn to respect each other, to join together as brothers, and
to respect, as well, the animals and plants. May the great Spirit of
the Sun light the way to true peace, if this you do!
23[End Page 355]
Framed by the Earth Lord's call for brotherhood and the state hymn,
the "fight for indigenous peoples" is presented as both revolutionary
and patriotic rather than as sectarian--in keeping with the title
of the play.
De todos para todos registers the difficulties posed by both
the daily life of indigenous peoples in Chiapas and the armed response to
them: it reflects the same ambivalence manifest in the uneasy truce
that was still being negotiated by the Zapatistas and Mexico's federal
government two years later. Each performance registers this ambivalence,
and the performers carefully calculate the risks. In the summer of 1996,
when the play was staged in indigenous communities, the rebel characters
wore the Zapatistas' signature red bandanas. In San Cristóbal (the
site of the original Zapatista uprising) and in the Chiapas state theatre
festival (where it took the state prize), they did not. Clearly, the
group changed the degree of overt political resistance in the performance
depending on its place, location, and likely audience. The audience
response confirmed this strategy. In the villages the Salinas mask
never failed to draw great laughter from the crowds, but this comic bit
would be sacrificed in the authority-
and ladino-dominated
urban centers. Nevertheless, ladino power is simultaneously
staged and subverted through the players' use of masks, drag, and an
exaggerated sing-song Spanish: the ladinos are greedy, lustful,
corrupt, and cowardly, in contrast to the Mayans who are pragmatic,
wise, and brave. These images may be stereotypical and Manichaean but
they nevertheless challenge the normative representational practices
of the Mexican media, which is largely content to leave ladinos
unmarked, and to overdetermine the representation of indigenous people
as exotic, socially underdeveloped, and/or dangerously revolutionary.
The Earth Lord is a particularly complex figure in this latter
representational practice, who, in the context of Zapatismo, merits
a closer reading. Visually, he is a quotation of the early Spanish
missionaries who furthered the aims of conquest; functionally, he is a
symbol of authority that predated the arrival of the Europeans. To the
troupe members, the figure represents power, and according to Ralph
Lee, who originally advocated what he calls a "more indigenous look,"
the troupe members preferred to see the Earth Lord as a green-robed,
white man.
24
Lee and I speculated, initially, that the
Earth Lord was, like many Mexican saints, the syncretic product of
Mayan and Catholic mythology, but the figure turned out to be more
complicated. According to anthropolgist Brenda Rosenbaum, Earth Lords
are often conceived and portrayed as blonde, fair-skinned ladino
couples. Such figures "represent transformations of the ancient Earth
deity that occurred as white intruders appropriated the indigenous lands,
which symbolize sustenance and wealth for Chamulas. . . . They express
the power that Ladinos hold over material resources [and] the imposition
of Ladino power over the Earth Mother."
25
In this view, the
Lo'il Maxil Earth Lord constitutes more than a simple synthesis of two
traditions. Off-stage, the Earth Lord may represent an "imposition" of
ladino power, a symbol that is now a fairly accurate depiction
of indigenous reality. Inserted where and how it is in De todos para
todos, however, it becomes charged with a new kind of agency, one
that will bring the end of revolution and the beginning of justice.
[End Page 356]
Rosenbaum's analysis of the Earth Lord is provocative in light of
this example; if the Earth Lords are generally depicted as couples, the
presence here of one Lord, gendered male, is surprising. But as is clear
from the Lo'il Maxil performance, gender trouble is not as important
as ethnic identity to the troupe and its productions.
26
Tradition, both within the group and in the communities from which it
draws its members, mitigates against women working outside the family
unit, especially when they are married. For that reason, Lo'il Maxil has
difficulty with actresses leaving the troupe, as young women must
leave the troupe once they marry and start their own families. This
situation tends to limit the number and kind of roles written into
their work. The campesina character in De todos para todos,
for example, can be read as a sign of the troupe's uneasiness over
the tensions between tradition and change. That she takes up arms is
a direct reflection of the active role of women in the real and
symbolic Zapatista rebellion; that she is the first to fall is a
sentimental recourse to the peculiar tragedy attending the deaths of
women and children in such rebellions.
27[End Page 357]
In contrast to Lo'il Maxil, an unflinching attention to
the day-to-day realities facing Mayan women and children informs both
process and product in the work of La Fomma. Off stage, they address the
family needs of their members by providing on-site daycare facilities
and educational programs for their children. On stage, they treat themes
specific to the problems faced by indigenous communities: alcoholic
and abusive spouses, poverty, and the dilemmas faced by campesinos
who are forced to make their way in the cities--treating them from the
perspective of women and children. These plays derive from the women's
personal experiences; in addition, co-founder Petrona de la Cruz Cruz has
been collecting ethnographic material from women in many small communities
in the highland region, which she then shapes into plays. To date, only
the plays of the other co-founder, Isabel Juárez Espinosa, have
been published, but scenes and the full texts of both women's plays have
been performed as far away as Belgium and Australia.
28
Although the plays are relentless in their exploration of women's
issues, they rarely point a finger only at men, and rarely
at non-Mayans. Instead, they frequently target the global economic
pressures that force men to work away from home, in low-paying jobs,
for unsympathetic bosses, in situations that are often abusive,
always anxiety-producing, and which deeply affect the relations and
interactions between men and women at home. For example, in some
communities where the majority of men work away from home for long
periods of time, women come to enjoy more autonomy and decision-making
power, which has in turn created new divisions of labor and produced new
anxieties about changing gender roles, for both women and men. Some men
therefore opt to move their families with them, where this is possible,
disrupting their spouse's networks of support from extended family and
other women. Several of La Fomma's plays explore this phenomenon of
tradition-in-change; Migración, by Juárez Espinosa,
is a good example.
29
En-gendering Neoliberalism: Migración
Migración, a short play published in 1994, shows how
neoliberal policies, which have forced many indigenous men to supplement
subsistence farming with migrant work and unskilled labor in the cities,
have particularly negative repercussions for women and children. The
play begins with the visit of a former resident (Mario) to his small farm
community. He has left to find what he calls an "easier life" in the
city, and because he has been to school and understands Spanish, he has
done relatively well for himself as the driver of a delivery truck. He
pressures his friend Fernando to give up his small parcel of land and join
him in the city, where Mario promises to find Fernando well-paying
work. Although Fernando entertains grave doubts about the
[End Page 358]
venture,
he agrees to consider the offer. Fernando clearly sees this decision
as his alone, but his wife Lucía disagrees. She tells Fernando
that he is on his own; she will not go with him. Eventually, Fernando
decides to stay.
Mario then tries his luck with another, more tractable friend, Carlos,
who has already been working here and there in the city, but as yet has
found nothing permanent. Meanwhile, Carlos has neglected his own land. He
immediately accepts Mario's offer to take him on as his assistant, even
though Mario must first clear it with his boss. When his wife
Catalina hears of this, she is enraged. Like Lucía, she tells
her husband to go ahead without her, as she is already used to working
the land by herself. To which Carlos replies:
You have to go wherever I go, whether you want to or not! As for the
land, if I want to sell it, I'll sell it, because it's mine! In fact,
I'm going to go right now and see if my compadre Fernando is
interested in buying it.
30
No sooner do they arrive in the city, where Carlos rents a few small rooms
on Mario's credit, than Carlos loses his job in a general layoff. And here
in the city, Mario's friendship amounts to nothing since he has his own
job to protect. With no other options and no marketable skills, Carlos
turns to drink. His drunken attempts to find work only compound his
humiliation, which peaks when the wife of his former friend evicts him
from their meager rooms. The play ends on a dismal note, with the family
homeless in city and country alike; Carlos's only prospect is piecemeal
work as a bricklayer, while Catalina must work as a domestic servant.
In this rather melodramatic plot and tragic denouement, the villains are
not ladinos, but ladino values, embodied in the character
of Mario. Even if he is Mayan, he speaks the language of the oppressor;
he works to deliver the merchandise circulating in the era of free trade;
he has not only forgotten his traditional loyalties, but, as Catalina puts
it, he now "lives off the sweat of his friends."
31
His tragedy
may be as great as that of Carlos, but Juárez Espinosa clearly
reserves her sympathy for the women. Of the three, only Lucía
maintains a degree of agency within her marriage, and it is questionable
whether she could do so if her husband were not already inclined to agree
with her. Even Mario's economically privileged wife Elena is forced to
do her husband's dirty work against her own friends. Given this kind
of gender inequality at the start, the additional pressures on rural
families in a neoliberal Mexico fall particularly hard on women and
children. In its disruptive effects on families and communities, the
play suggests, neoliberal capitalism has much in common with colonialism.
Like the other plays both women have written, Migración's
portrayal of contemporary life for Mayan women is unleavened with
any comic relief. The authors are far more committed to exposing the
current local conflict than to "rescuing" local lore or ancient
history. Perhaps the latter task seems less pressing, since Mayan women
already play roles in tourist, anthropological, and social dramas by
wearing their culture on their backs: working at their looms or washing
clothes at the river, the native women dressed in ribboned braids and
embroidered trajes have become a
[End Page 359]
favorite tourist photo
opportunity and travel poster subject. In this environment, the women's
performance of the male parts in Migración takes on a new
significance. When they assume these roles, they do not do so as a
"drag" quotation of male stereotypes.
Born of a necessity created by the all-female composition of the group,
and played so as not to attract attention away from the play's serious
themes, the cross-gender casting nevertheless presents a startling
contrast to the usual images of women in public performances. In the
yearly religious fiestas honoring a village's patron saint, or
during Carnival and Holy Week celebrations, men in drag act as women
both for comic effect and to highlight proper gender behavior through
its exaggerated opposite. During these fiestas, women share the
religious offices, prepare and serve the great feasts that accompany
them, and watch with avid interest, but they never perform.
32
The women's portrayal of men in Migración reverses these
cross-gender casting traditions not only in fact, but also in style. On
stage, they are able to refashion a whole performance tradition that has
historically mocked and excluded them. Given that indigenous women in this
area are expected to be neither seen nor heard, and that
[End Page 360]
actresses
are often regarded as little more than prostitutes, La Fomma's example
has radical potential on-stage and off. Before the Zapatista uprising,
indigenous women in Chiapas and throughout Mexico had "subordinated issues
of gender equality to their peoples' struggle for material and cultural
survival."
33
For years, that struggle has been articulated in
movements toward the re-establishment of local governance or "customary
law" in indigenous communities. Now, as journalist Rosa Rojas documents
in her two volumes of Chiapas ¿y las mujeres qué?, such
women are beginning to question the "customary law of indigenous societies
that historically has excluded and oppressed women."
34
She
notes further that they are criticized for "defending the repeated claims
they've made that . . . it is the women themselves who must decide
what should remain [of customary law] and what should be changed as
being detrimental to their human rights."
35
So, as the work
of Lo'il Maxil and La Fomma indicates, at the same time as many Mayans
are mapping out a kind of collective identity based on long tradition,
Mayan women contest that identity to the extent that it interferes with
their own rights, experience, and expression as women.
Because of their high national and international profile and their
relationships with non-Mexican anthropologists and artists, both groups
have acquired a certain stature and sanction within Mexico; Lo'il Maxil
in particular is frequently held up as exemplary of "Mayan theatre" by
Mexican cultural ambassadors to the rest of the world. As a result,
it is possible to view their work as already circumscribed by the
cultural framework in which they operate, and thus as a form of co-opted
resistance. But, as Eric van Young has suggested in his review of rural
and popular theatre movements in Mexico, this is not always the case:
much depends upon "the respective viewpoints of historical subject and
observer."
36
This is a particularly difficult moment for
the historical subjects involved in producing this theatre, especially
when they stage work, like De todos para todos, that is overtly
political. At such a moment, the Zapatistas themselves adopted similar
strategies of international affiliation in order to assure that
their demands were not immediately and summarily dismissed, but these
affiliations afford them less and less protection as the Mexican
government has moved, in recent months, to remove all foreigners who
express support for Zapatismo in any form. In these circumstances, and
in view of the popularity these groups enjoy when they perform for local
communities as well as for international observers, staging such work
is as risky as ever.
It is not surprising, then, that other theatre troupes in Mayan Mexico
avoid overtly political work, even when they align themselves clearly with
indigenous groups. The Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena
is one such example: though less political, their work is nevertheless
far more controversial.
[End Page 361]
Bodas de sangre, bodas de culturas:
Intercultural/Indigenous Theatre in Tabasco
Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena [LTCI] has an
international reputation as a Mexican rural and indigenous theatre
troupe, as its name suggests. This reputation has been built on nearly
fifteen years of performing the works of both the Western and
Mexican canons, plays written specifically for them by their own
urban Mexican director, and, less frequently, works they have developed
themselves. Further, this reputation--at least in Mexico--has been
composed of equal parts of fame and infamy; those who know of their work
have widely ranging opinions but they are never lukewarm. This passion
has more to do with deeply felt cultural identification than with
aesthetic judgment.
LTCI began in 1983 in Tabasco, a small, oil-
and water-rich state
on Mexico's Gulf coast, on the western border of the Yucatán
Peninsula. Two indigenous groups, the Chontales and the Choles, both
of Mayan origins, share a long history in the region, and comprise
more than 10 percent of the state's population. Although both groups
have always maintained "traditional" ways of community organization and
fishing/agricultural lifestyles, work in the oil fields and
migration to the relatively prosperous urban center is changing that way
of life for many. At the same time, as Ruben Vera Cabrera points out,
these "aggressions against Chontal culture" have been mitigated to some
extent by state and federal development programs designed to improve
the state's infrastructure and educational system, and to "rescue its
cultural traditions" at the community level.
37
This effort to rescue tradition led to the development of the
Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena. In 1983, Julieta
Campos, wife of the state's then-governor, ran the state's family
services programs. She hoped to establish a theatre specifically
aimed at community development, in a way initially reminiscent of
some of the earlier government-sponsored cultural missionary work of
the 1940s and 1950s, whose goal was to modernize and "mestizize" the
countryside. She solicited the assistance of theatre director María
Alicia Martínez Medrano, who had built a reputation adapting the
techniques of Stanislavsky and Meyerhold (as introduced to Mexico through
Japanese director Seki Sano) in theatre workshops for campesinos/as
and other workers in Michoacán and Yucatán.
38
Campos hoped to have Martínez Medrano organize similar workshops
in Tabasco to help campesino communities throughout the state develop
plays based on social and family themes.
Martínez Medrano had other ideas, however. In 1983, she and a
team of graduate directors of her Yucatán workshops conducted a
state-wide survey of communities in Tabasco to determine whether they
wished to participate in Campos's program.
[End Page 362]
Backed carte blanche by
Campos, the team was able to offer free worskhops to children, youth, and
any adults who could spare the time. In May of 1983, Oxolotán,
a small pueblo of approximately 1500 residents located several hours
away from the state capital, was the first to agree; by July, six
other small communities throughout the state formed a network of LTCI
troupes. In its first six months, this organization developed the
Laboratorio's best-known production: Federico García Lorca's
Bodas de sangre (Blood Wedding), "Oxolotecan version."
This would become the signature production for the entire Laboratorio
network over the next fourteen years. Martínez Medrano and a
cast of literally hundreds of Oxolotecans transferred García
Lorca's original tragic drama of passion and vengeance from the Spanish
countryside to the Tabascan cornfields. In the process, local history
was recuperated in several ways. The Oxolotecan version is set in a
time before post-Revolutionary castellanization (hispanizing) programs
worked, in Tabasco particularly, to erase such signs of "indianness"
as traditional dress, ways of farming, and the native languages. These
signs reappear in the new version: the traditional traje is worn
by both women and men; machetes take the place of the knives that play
such a key role in the original; and songs, composed by the community,
are performed in a mixture of Spanish and Chontal, as is much of the text.
The mise en scène created by Martínez Medrano for this
production of Blood Wedding would eventually be deployed
in other productions as far away as Mexico City, Spain, and New
York. In Oxolotán, the communal lands donated for the "Constantin
Stanislavsky" outdoor theatre space featured a vast expanse of field,
with distant trees providing a backdrop.
39
A raised wooden
platform in the center of the area served for all interior scenes; it
was flanked on one side by a tower, which provided several playing
levels for the action.
While remaining generally faithful to García Lorca's original
text, Martínez Medrano has distilled some parts and added others,
most notably an overture called "The Presentiment of Death." In the LTCI
script little more than the entrance of La muerte (Death) is noted, but
in fact, this overture comprises more than a quarter of an hour and
serves as a thematic prologue. With the exception of four harlequin
figures dressed in "traditional" motley, the entire cast stands
locked in figures suggestive of their roles in the play as this
black-robed figure on horseback slowly approaches from a distant
point on the horizon. After the harlequins flee in fear, Death traces
slow figures in and around the assembled characters--including
the two rival lovers, frozen together in the prologue as they will be
in death at the end of the play. Death will reappear in the final
scene, replacing the Beggar Woman and Moon of the original text as the
literal sign of herself. Her cape is spread in two enormous wings, which
she passes over the pueblo and the bodies of the two rivals. Like the
original, the play ends with a chorus of weeping women. But these women
are from Oxolotán (in every respect), and the wedding they have
come from is not the one García Lorca imagined, but one whose
music and dances were born there as well.
In production, then, the combination of García Lorca's text and
the Oxolotecan mise en scène constitutes a hybrid performance. In
Max Harris's terms, the (Oxolotecan)
[End Page 363]
performance exists in dialogic
relationship to the (European) text, and the result is neither purely one
or the other.
40
But to call this performance a hybrid evades
a particular critical concern: is this yet another example of the use of
"indigenous bodies" in service of Western (hegemonic) culture? In Mexico
this concern was expressed by critics who cried "contamination," as though
there was some essential native purity corrupted by the participants'
exposure to works of the Western canon and Martínez Medrano's
directing techniques. Through such exposure and participation, so the
argument went, Indians would lose their taste for more traditional forms
[End Page 364]
of theatre and, by extension, traditional ways of life.
41
On the U.S. side of the border, the critique might ask whether this
exposure to the "universal art" (Martínez Medrano's words) of
Shakespeare, García Lorca, and other Western classics really masks
an agenda of Western cultural imposition and/or indoctrination. Is LTCI
really just another "cultural missionary exercise" aimed at "civilizing
the natives?" This was my original presumption. Although the company's
initial impetus may have been influenced by the cultural missionary
discourse, the resulting performances and the contexts in which they are
created modify that claim by allowing for the enunciation of resolutely
local--rather than transcendentally universal--values and norms.
The issue of educational access provides an important example. Those
Laboratorios carrying on the original design of the program (three
years of training in acting, voice, directing, movement, theatrical and
political history, etc.), take the place of college for most of its young
participants. In the poor rural communities and urban neighborhoods
in which LTCI usually works, these youngsters would most likely have
abandoned formal education for work at some point during high school,
if not earlier. If they are lucky enough to attend university, there
they would be subject to even greater "Westernizing" pressures, without
an equivalent valorization of their own traditions, which the LTCI work
is at pains to provide (even if it runs the risk of essentializing and
exaggerating those traditions).
This tension between (modern) education and (traditional) practices
has led some critics to claim that LTCI activity ruptures traditional
community ways of life: if everyone in the small community is involved
somehow in the theatre, and is compensated for that involvement (as
happened in the days when the budget was unlimited), then theatre can
be seen as something akin to petroleum in its effects on the Tabascan
way of life. In my view, there are at least two problems with this
characterization. One, it reflects a desire for purity-at-all-costs,
and pleads an imposed authenticity that compels such communities to
stay "occupied with the Savior's concern," as Trinh T. Minh-ha puts it,
describing the ways a "return to roots" rhetoric can operate as both
product and tool of hegemony.
42
Second, such a view implicitly
denies the possibility of community agency and decision-making, as though
they were merely the passive receptacles of change.
While it is true that the Laboratorio did not emerge organically out of
the communities in which it is now placed, Martínez Medrano did not
simply descend on them, and proceed to work without their permission and
cooperation. (On the contrary, she had to work hard to get permission.) In
the dedication to a published version of LTCI's first original work,
Oxolotecan co-author Auldárico Hernández Gerónimo
wrote:
. . . we have heard so many promises that have in the end turned
out to be lies, and therefore I didn't believe in the Laboratorio de
Teatro Campesino e Indígena. As time passed, I realized that
the Laboratorio is serious. Because I saw it, among children and young
people of our communities. I lived it. It does attempt to re-validate our
culture. Not
[End Page 365]
like other institutions that only assist in ethnocide,
that absorb our leaders, trapping them in bureaucracy and turning them
into renegades and traitors; they corrupt our leaders, who in turn try
to corrupt others. That is also why I asked permission of the elders,
to have their consent and their trust.
43
The work was developed over eight months of interviews with these
elders. In this light, it is hard to sustain a notion that whole
communities were simply doing anything the intellectuals of campesino
theatre asked of them in return for a bite to eat, as one anti-LTCI
critic charged.
44
Although LTCI, like Lo'il Maxil and La Fomma, represents itself as a
company of indigenous artists, its work is rather more intercultural
than that of the other two groups; its repertory includes European
classics as well as local interpretations, and its general acting style
blends Meyerhold and Stanislavsky by way of a Japanese director and his
non-indigenous Mexican disciple. At the same time, while their work is
less overtly political than that of other groups, the critical controversy
surrounding this work suggests that LTCI is nevertheless actively engaged
in the production of ethnicity.
Further Development: Yucatecan Grassroots Theatre
For a variety of reasons--geographical location, political and
economic history, climate, travel and tourism, etc.--the peoples of the
Yucatán Peninsula have perhaps had more opportunity to interact
with the rest of the world than any other region of the Republic. Despite
(or perhaps because of) official Yucatán's openness to
international exchange, its Mayan populace has yet to enjoy full
participation in that trade; for most of the region's modern history,
Yucatecan Mayans have been consigned to its worst lands, or to work
on someone else's land in virtual serfdom. For many, these neo-colonial
relations persist: the remotest communities are also the poorest; economic
opportunities continue to be unevenly distributed according to ethnicity;
and many Yucatecan Mayans serve as the exploited underclass in an
exploitative tourist industry; they work as guides at the archaeological
sites, produce handicrafts for sale in and around tourist destinations,
and perform with folkloric dance troupes in and near the tourist hotels.
In this context, cultural identity in the region does indeed seem
hybrid: it is provisional rather than the fixed and stable
product of identification. Nevertheless, culturally distinct and
identifiable traits can and do emerge: even if these traits are
produced by the relations between the Maya and the rest of the world, they
still play as important a role in the formation of Mayan identity
as they do in the production of Mayan alterity. Increasingly, with
the growth over the past fifteen years of community-based theatre
activity on the peninsula, theatre in the Yucatecan language is a site
where these often conflicting processes are both represented and
enacted. Although this theatre relies far less on the contributions of
non-community members than the Laboratorios, for instance, as a regional
movement it too can trace its roots to state-sponsored programs in the
1960s and 1970s; many of its organizers were trained by
[End Page 366]
professional
theatre artists from Mexico City and have gone on to provide their own
forms of training within the community.
As a final example, I now return to the figure of the
"Modern Locust," created by playwright Feliciano Sánchez Chan, a
Yucatán native who has been active in community theatre in the
Mayan language since the early 1980s. The play in which it appears,
Las langostas (The Locusts) was originally written in
Yucatecan Mayan, and subsequently translated by Sánchez Chan; both
versions have been published in a two-volume anthology of the theatre
of Sánchez Chan and his collaborators.
45
In Las langostas, Sánchez Chan blends history, myth, and
contemporary social commentary to take on, among other things, that
overburdened icon of global culture: Coca Cola. Taking as his starting
point a plague of locusts that decimated Yucatán in the 1940s,
Sánchez Chan then skillfully weaves a series of scenes to suggest
that junk food and cola are modern-day locusts, effectively starving
the region's children to death. The message--to eat more healthily--is
not a new one: even Mexican television commercials for Coke and snack
foods carry a similar warning. What is more interesting is the way
Sánchez Chan situates the responsibility for the problem squarely
within the community's "response-ability" to it, and how he enforces
that message theatrically through powerful local symbols.
The play opens with two prologues: one aural, one visual. In the
first, flute and drum music provide a background to a "voice"
telling the mythical history of the Mayan peoples, based on the Mayan
books of wisdom, the Chilam Balam. It seems to start already
in progress, in the middle of the creation story that ends with the
formation of humans from maize. It continues through the prophesy of
conquest and its aftermath in the forced marginalization of the Maya
who, forced to speak their language and perform their rites in hiding,
soon began to forget both; they abandon their gods, and are in turn
abandoned by them. This prologue ends with an introduction to the play
proper, which will recount "how the inhabitants of the rural zones of
Yucatán live."
46
The second, silent prologue is a rear projection that shows a field
of healthy corn, in silhouette. Suddenly swarms of locusts descend and in
moments leave nothing behind. In shadow, the figure of a man and a
giant locust appear. They fight, and the locust flies off. Even
without the first prologue, the second provides a powerful image that
no one in this corn-growing region is likely to dismiss. But coupled with
the first prologue, the connection between past and present is made
more clear, and the symbolic association between historical and modern
locusts anticipated: locusts consume corn. In the Mayan creation myth,
humans are made of corn; therefore, locusts can consume humans as well.
In the first two scenes, the plague and its aftermath are presented
through the experiences of several villagers: a couple who decide to
leave to find work on a coffee plantation; an old man who decides
to stay and most likely dies of starvation; a widower who returns
later to the village, having lost his wife to malaria on the coffee
plantation. The figure of the giant locust appears from time to time
in the play, and assumes the stature of a force that is difficult
to fight. When, for example, he appears
[End Page 367]
in the dreams of a
young boy, that boy refuses to eat the tortillas and beans his mother
has prepared for him, demanding money from his mother to buy soda and
snacks instead. Soon a neighbor appears, and reveals that she routinely
gives her children money for such fare, as a way to keep peace in her
household. Furthermore, the snacks are cheaper than milk and meat, more
convenient than caring for a garden and livestock, and allow her the
freedom of afternoon telenovelas (which are sponsored by the soda
and snack food companies).
The parallel scenes deepen this debate, which comes to a head only when
the neighbor's infant develops a severe stomach problem from having
been fed Coke instead of milk. The whole community rallies together and
decides to raise its own food. When the giant locust reappears--this time
in a costume composed of hundreds of pop cans and junk food wrappers--the
people fight him with the tools of their farming trade, and leave
him for dead, declaring in unison: "A PUEBLO THAT PRODUCES WHAT IT EATS
WILL NEVER BE MANIPULATED."
47
In the end, however, the Locust
has the final moment: cursing the public and making rude gestures
at them, he bursts into laughter and runs off.
If this Modern Locust has the final moment, does he have the
play? Is the community defeated without even realizing it? How should this
ambiguous ending be taken? I prefer to see it as a structural counterpart
to the first prologue. The play began in Mayan prophesy, and ends on
another prophetic note: the battle between community self-sufficiency
and absorption into global capitalism, as the play accurately foretells,
will go on and on. Again, what is most important is the community's
role in
[End Page 368]
its own self-defense and definition. The final
moment is less a defeat than a call to continued vigilance.
Sánchez Chan's deployment of Coca Cola suggests a particular
kind of engagement with this now universal symbol of global
postmodernity. Outside of Mayan Mexico, critics of cultural imperialism
tend to view the spread of Coke as something like smallpox. But, as
Castañeda also points out, "the natives in the periphery of
capitalism have incorporated Coke into their lives as part of their
reality (often) without any contradiction in their own eyes, just as they
have done with countless other Western artifacts and ideas."
48
He calls for "a historical analysis of the complex apparatuses that
produce, market, distribute, disseminate, consume both Coke and its
concept."
49
In my view, this is exactly what Sánchez
Chan does, in poetic terms, from his culture's center (which is Coke's
periphery), and using that culture's own modes of historic analysis
(the Mayan prophetic tradition). If he focuses on the threat Coca Cola
represents, he also focuses on the complicity of the locals in its
spread, refusing to deny his own people responsiblity for determining
what form and direction their own future will take.
Each of the groups discussed here makes a different claim to
active ethnicity, and each occupies a different position on the
discursive spectrum between an enforced authenticity and a compulsive
hybridity. Lo'il Maxil stakes this claim in the increasingly unstable
political environment of Chiapas; despite this, the group has not
retreated into the relative safety of its earlier repertory of Mayan
folktales. La Fomma's scrutiny of contemporary gender politics within
Mayan society exposes the limits of the kind of active ethnicity that
depends for its power on recourse to traditions inimical to women's
well-being. Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena's
intertextual and intercultural work seems to belie both the claim to
active ethnicity and the indigenist implications of its own name, but the
debates ignited by their work nevertheless revolve almost entirely around
questions of cultural identification and representation, and suggest
that the group is staging a new kind of ethnicity in action. Finally,
"ethnicity in action" finds new power in much of the grassroots
theatre of the Yucatán peninsula, which compels recognition of
its people as historical, Mayan subjects.
Thus, as the Mexican government moves rhetorically--but not yet
substantially--toward a new democratic state, Mayan-identified
theatre emerges as an important alternative site for ethnic
self-representation. Beyond its utility in such necessary struggles,
theatre has also proven for many of its Mayan participants to be
powerfully transformative on an individual level. I close this discussion
with the words of Maruch Sántiz Gómez, a young Tzotzil
actress and photographer who was working with Sna Jtz'Ibajom in the
summer of 1996. This work had been an ongoing source of friction between
Sántiz Gómez and her father, whose belief that her work
was morally suspect at times erupted in violence and abuse. Last summer
she confronted him, and her story speaks to the power of theatre as a
transformative practice:
I used to be very timid, very fearful. But as an actress, I learned
how to use my voice better. When I spoke with my father, it wasn't with
anger, but yes, he listened.
50
Tamara Underiner is Assistant Professor of Theatre History,
Literature, and Criticism at the University of Minnesota. This is her
first published essay.
Notes
1.
The play, De todos para todos (From All, For All) is
the collective creation of the Lo'il Maxil theatre troupe, discussed in
more detail below. The translation mentioned is by Robert M. Laughlin,
"From All, For All: A Tzotzil-Tzeltal Tragicomedy," American
Anthropologist 97 (1995): 528-42. When quoting the play, however,
I use my own translation; all other translations are mine as well.
2.
The play is Migración, by Isabel Juárez
Espinosa, also discussed in more detail below. See also Robert Myers,
"Mayan Women Find Their Place Is on the Stage," New York Times,
28 September 1997: 4ff.
3.
Federico García Lorca's Bodas de sangre
(Blood Wedding) was adapted by María Alicia Martínez
Medrano for the Laboratorio de Teatro Campesino e Indígena of
Oxolatán, Tabasco (Villahermosa: Edición especial imprimido
por el Gobierno del Estado de Tabasco, 1986). The website URL is:
http://www.arts-history.mx/foto/holourdes.html.
4.
Feliciano Sánchez Chan, Las langostas (The
Locusts) in Teatro Maya Contemporáneo Volume 2
(Mexico: INI and SEDESOL, 1994).
5.
In Mexico, "neoliberalism" refers to a program of economic
reform, begun in the 1980s, that can be loosely but validly translated as
"Reaganomics" for U.S. readers: a commitment to an economy based on free
enterprise rather than state control, legalized by constitutional reforms
passed by the Salinas Gortari administration (1988-1994). On New
Year's Day of 1994--the effective date of NAFTA--the Zapatista Army of
National Liberation (EZLN) seized seven towns in Chiapas and declared war
on the Mexican government. They rose up in protest of both NAFTA (for
imposing unfair competition on local farmers), and the recent repeal
of Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican Constitution (which took away the
protection of indigenous communities' right to their own lands). Given
the superior strength and numbers of the Mexican military and the ease
with which it could have crushed the rebellion, the cease-fire after
thirteen days of fighting, and subsequent peace talks were considered
by many to be victories in their own right. However, in September 1996
the Zapatistas themselves called a halt to the talks, claiming that the
government was no longer acting in good faith. The peace process remains
at a stalemate and from time to time there are violent confrontations
between federal troops and paramilitary organizations on the one side,
and the Zapatistas and their supporters on the other--for example, the
massacre on 22 December 1997, of 46 residents of the village of Acteal
near San Cristóbal.
6.
John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America,
Chiapas, and Yucatan (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1841).
7.
Quetzil E. Castañeda, In the Museum of Maya
Culture: Touring Chichén Itzá (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), 13.
9.
In the Yucatán peninsula, indigenous people refer
to themselves as "Maya," but often this term is interchangeable
with "mestizo," which signifies a more-or-less
traditional lifestyle, contrasted with that of the catrín,
or "citified people." In Chiapas, the identification
is first with community, then linguistic group (there are more
than twenty Mayan languages, each related to one of two major roots,
Yucatec and Quiché), and then Maya. In Tabasco, linguistic group
(Chol, Chontal) seems to be the primary term of identification. The
Mexican government also designates ethnicity by primary language spoken--a
slippery designation, no matter who makes it, due to historical pressures
to speak the language of power--Spanish. In the past five years,
there have been efforts among Mayan intellectuals and activists to
develop a "pan-Mayan" identity, one which spans geopolitical borders in
order to achieve greater representation in matters affecting indigenous
peoples. Many observers, Castañeda included, relate this
effort to the rise of the new Zapatista movement, although its origins
have also been traced to liberation theology and social justice movements
of the past 25 years.
10.
Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth: Culture
and Ideology in the Mexican National Space (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992), 280.
11.
Jorge Klor de Alva, "The Postcolonization of the
(Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of 'Colonialism,'
'Postcolonialism,' and 'Mestizaje,'" in After Colonialism: Imperial
Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 242.
12.
Biodun Jeyifo, "The Reinvention of Theatrical Tradition:
Critical Discourses on Interculturalism in the African Theatre," in The
Dramatic Touch of Difference: Theatre, Own and Foreign, ed. Erika
Fischer-Lichte, J. Riley, and M. Gissenwehrer (Tübingen: Gunter
Narr Verlag, 1990), 247.
13.
The groups' international reputations are due in large part
to the efforts of their U.S. adviser/promoters, anthropologist Robert
M. Laughlin and writer Miriam Laughlin, who were also instrumental
in securing the international funding that enabled the groups'
formation. See Miriam Laughlin, "Arts: the Drama of Mayan Women,"
Ms. (July-Aug. 1991): 88-89; Robert Laughlin, "The Mayan
Renaissance: Sna Jtz'Ibajom, The House of the Writer," Native American
Cultures: Before and After Columbus (Honolulu: Hawaii Committee for
the Humanities, 1992). As mentioned above, La Fomma was also the subject
of a recent article in the New York Times.
For further analysis of the actitive ethnicity of Mayan theatre, see
Donald Frischmann's "Active Ethnicity: Nativism, Otherness, and Indian
Theatre in Mexico," Gestos 11 (April 1991): 113-26; "New
Mayan Theatre in Chiapas: Anthropology, Literacy, and Social Drama,"
in Negotiating Performance: Gender, Sexuality, and Theatricality in
Latin/o America, ed. Diana Taylor and Juan Villegas (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1994), 213-38.
For a feminist critique suggesting that "active ethnicity" is often
achieved at the expense of gender equity and Mayan women's rights--as
when, for example, the "preservation of culture" means the continuance
of misogynistic practices under the rubric of cultural "authenticity,"
see Cynthia Steele's "A Woman Fell into the River: Negotiating Female
Subjects in Contemporary Mayan Theatre," in Taylor, ed., Negotiating
Performance, 239-56.
14.
See Steele, "A Woman Fell into the River," which documents
the reasons for the split, most of which had to do with tensions arising
from the women's emerging feminism and international exposure, and the
group's desire to maintain a gender-role tradition that compels women
to be more passive.
15.
For the past year, however, the group has chosen to focus
on its two most well-known plays, Dinastía de jaguares
(an epic historical play about the Conquest), and 1994's De todos para
todos, discussed here. Frischmann and Steele provide plot summaries
of many of the other plays in their respective essays in Taylor, ed.,
Negotiating Performance.
16.
Sna Jtz'Ibajom, De todos para todos, in
Renacimiento del Teatro Maya en Chiapas (México: INI,
1996), 2:119. The Zoques are another indigenous-language group resident
in Chiapas.
17.
Ladino is a term used in Chiapas and Guatemala
to refer to non-Mayans. Synonymous neither with "white" nor "mestizo"
(it originally referred to the language spoken by the Sephardic Jews
expelled from Spain in 1492), it is the prevailing term used by Mayans
for those who enjoy or aspire to the privileges of a Western lifestyle.
18.
Lee is artistic director of New York State's Mettawee River
Company, a theatre organization that produces pageants and parades, such
as the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, which feature giant puppets
and masks.
19.
Sna Jtz'Ibajom, De todos, 122. All translations
are mine.
20.
That is, the Salinas mask appears when the performance
occurs in the villages, away from official eyes and interventions. In
the town square, for international audiences and observers, and in
the state theatre festival, Salinas's features were replaced with a
non-character-specific half-mask.
27.
Woman-as-sacrifice is also a motif in
Dinastía de jaguares, first produced in 1992, the
other play that the group has chosen to focus on in 1998. Interestingly,
when I saw the series of performances of De todos given over
the course of the 1996 summer, more and more women rebels were added
as extras to the final scene, until by August even the troupe's
ladino secretary had donned Chamulan traje (traditional
clothing) and taken part in the action.
28.
Juárez Espinosa's plays have been published in
her Cuentos y Teatro Tzeltales (México: Editorial Diana,
1994). The group's international exposure is facilitated by their
U.S. advisor, Miriam Laughlin, who has coordinated their visits to
women's playwrighting symposia and arranged performances in university
settings, usually in conjunction with programs on indigenous political and
cultural movements. As their reputation has grown, so has their network
of potential collaborators: for example, three faculty members from
Barnard College spent last spring with the group, conducting workshops
in storytelling, puppetwork, maskmaking, and theatre improvisation. This
in turn has had the effect of making their work more theatrical and less
derivative of mass mediated forms such as the Mexican telenovela,
a form which their earlier work, including Migración,
reflects.
32.
See, for example, Victor Bricker, Ritual Humor in
Highland Chiapas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1975).
33.
Christine E. Eber, "Three Women's Experiences of the
Zapatista Uprising" (unpublished essay, 1996), 3.
34.
Rosa Rojas, Del dicho al hecho: reflexiones sobre
la ampliación de la ley revolucionaria de mujeres del EZLN
(México: Ediciones del Taller Editorial La Correa Feminista,
1996), no page.
36.
Eric van Young, "Conclusion: The State as Vampire--Hegemonic
Projects, Public Ritual, and Popular Culture in Mexico 1600-1990,"
in Rituals of Rule, Rituals of Resistance: Public Celebrations and
Popular Culture in Mexico, ed. William H. Beezley, Cheryl English
Martin, and William E. French (Wilmington: SR Books, 1994), 366.
37.
Ruben Vera Cabrera, "Los Chontales de Tabasco: Historia
y Desarrollo," Expresión 20 (1987): 2.
38.
Seki Sano left Japan in 1930, after he was arrested for
Marxist political activism, and spent time in exile in Moscow, Paris,
and New York before settling in Mexico City in 1939. While in Moscow
he met and studied with both Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, and introduced
the methods of both to his Mexican students, but he rarely credited the
latter in his work. As a result, "the system" in Mexico bears a marked
but generally unacknowledged Meyerholdian stamp. See Michiko Tanaka,
"Seki Sano and Popular Political and Social Theatre in Latin America,"
Latin American Theatre Review 27 (Spring 1994): 53-69.
39.
All of the LTCI outdoor spaces are named for famous European
and Mexican playwrights and directors.
40.
Max Harris, The Dialogical Theatre: Dramatizations
of the Conquest of Mexico and the Question of the Other (New York:
St. Martin's Press, 1993). Harris is referring on the one hand to the
Spanish missionary practice of staging evangelical dramas utilizing
native actors; and on the other to representations of the Conquest in
European drama.
41.
This point of view was often related to me by people in
Mexico aware of LTCI's work; it also appeared in an article by Gerardo
Albarrán, "Julieta Campos rememora con nostalgia el Teatro
Campesino e Indígena de Oxolotán," Proceso 1008
(26 Feb. 1996): 52-58.
42.
Trinh T. Min-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1989), 89.
43.
Auldárico Hernández Gerónimo,
Eutimio Hernández Román, Martha Alicia Trejo Espinoza, and
María Alicia Martínez Medrano, La tragedia del jaguar
(Villahermosa and México: Instituto de Cultura de Tabasco,
1989), 15-16.
44.
Reynaldo Zuñiga, "'Teatro Campesino,' cortina de
humo de corruptelas, malversación y degeneración," (n.p. 24
abril 1990): 48 (photocopy in archives of Centro de Investigación
Teatral Rodolfo Usigli, Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mexico City).
45.
Feliciano Sánchez Chan, Teatro Maya
Contemporáneo, volumes 1 and 2 (México: INI and
SEDESOL, 1994).
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