Senses of the Salón: Performance and Literary Aesthetics in Mexico City’s Spaces of Spectacle

In this dissertation, “Senses of the Salón: Performance and Literary Aesthetics in Mexico City’s Spaces of Spectacle” I argue that in Mexico’s capital city, the space of the cabaret— the semi-public zone of the masses founded on women’s labor—and the tertulia—the elite, predominantly male and exclusive literary salon—may seem diametrically opposed, but are actually interconnected. Conceptualizing Mexico City’s performance and literary scenes as mutually informing each other broadens the categories of the “productive citizen” and the “avant-garde” to include women, racialized minorities, and alternative artistic praxis. Foregrounding the bodily, sensorial dimension of the labor of Mexico City performers and “high” aesthetes is a point of entry to what Francine Masiello calls “a larger discussion of the effects of state practices of its people and, alternatively, [of] the ways in which the population resists or transforms social life [...T]he senses are the way through which a culture finds its location” (3). By charting constellations of Mexico City dance hall imaginaries and their accompanying intellectual history from the early 1920s to the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994), we see how alternative, counterdiscursive, and/or bottom-up forms of social organization borne out of the Mexican Revolution clash with the virility and parochially statist nature of the country’s literary forms, artistic representatives, and political icons. The institutional fabric of Mexico City in the 1920s and 1930s is still in post-war flux, rendering the capital city a fertile sensorium for experimental, democratic art and performance; but into the 1940s and 1950s, Mexico City’s socio-political sphere begins to flatten with the didactic, domineering influence of the (trans)national “Golden Age” cinema industry, and more locally in Mexico City, the moralizing censorship demanded by its infamous regente de hierro, Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, over three sexenios. The 1960s to the 1980s, with increased flows of foreign capital investment and Hollywood culture from the north, not to mention the apex moment of consolidation of the Mexican one-party autocracy of the PRI, showcases a turbulent mixture of violent political oppression and innovative responses of creative resistance and discursive memory. The more tolerant salones of the cabaret and the tertulia—facilitating symbiotic, though other times parasitic, relationships between popular workers and intellectuals throughout the decades—are the sensorial and inter-class glue, providing a window into the contact between art, economic policy, gender, and space. Put most explicitly, a focus on the two salones emphasizes the ways in which women, minorities, and occasionally foreigners are also intellectual authors fueling 20th century Mexico City’s at once cosmopolitan progressivism, at once highly idiosyncratic and nationalistic arts and culture scene.Chapter I begins in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, tracing a primarily female migration from rural to urban areas. With this labor upswing, Mexico City experienced a surge in the number of dance halls, cantinas, and sui generis hybrids of the two spaces. Though theatrical revue in Mexico has an impressive history that was established well before the beginning of the 20th century, the cabaret was a distinct space and came with new attitudes, new “structures of feeling” that attracted, and generated creative responses by Mexico’s artists and authors. Chapter I illustrates how the feedback loop between cabaret culture and literary expression was reflected in the motifs of established genres of differing political bents in the 1920s and 30s, such as the newspaper (El Nacional, El Demócrata, etc.), the literary journal (El Molino Verde, El Universal Ilustrado), and the poetry chapbook. I argue that the cabaret was equally instrumentalized by members of feuding literary groups in the capital, such as the estridentistas and the contemporáneos. Chapter II opens with bolero composer Agustín Lara and fictional narrative Rosa de cabaret by writer Vereo Guzmán to explore how the Mexican public was exposed to cabaret imaginaries on race and class through popular culture, in the form of radio broadcasts and the novel, that circulated in private domains and contributed to the “public intimacy” desired by middle-class women. The chapter then centers on two incomplete films by members of the international avant-garde—Que Viva México! by Sergei Eisenstein and La mancha de sangre by Adolfo Best Maugard—in order to illustrate the ways in which the cabaret was a space of inspiration not only for those who produced “official” Mexican cultural texts of the Golden Age of film in the 1940s and 50s, but also for progressive art practitioners whose works presaged political sea change in Mexico of the late 1930s. The two films’ shared status of material degradation as well as the involvement of real-life cabaret performers emphasizes the importance of the cabaretera in registering the development of labor policy for women in Mexico. The chapter closes with Emilio Fernández’s film Salón México and Aaron Copland’s symphony piece “El Salon Mexico”, arguing that the Mexican cinema industry and the predominantly male membership of the international literati overlooked the feminine, bodily question inherent to cabaret performance, opting instead for narratives of whitewashed social mobility as in the former, and macho-dominated proletarian unity in the latter. Chapter III hones in on the privileged act of writing in relation to the literary role of “the muse”. In his story “El Café de nadie” (1926), estridentista author Arqueles Vela discursively protagonizes “loose” women who cater to the powerful tertulia crowd. The chapter then details the life and work of tertulia hostess, cabaret owner, writer, and socialite Antonieta Rivas Mercado, whose relationship to Mexican politician and cultural attaché José Vasconcelos epitomizes the melding of politics, performance, and gender relations of the 1930s. The chapter explores Rivas Mercado’s dedication to the genre of the personal diary, looking to how an educated, liberated, and mobile woman in the 1930s (fails to) reconcile her exclusion from Mexico City’s taxonomies of writing circles. The chapter segues into the genre of the chronicle, looking to critic and historian Carlos Monsiváis and what I call his “exceptional cosmopolitanism”: that is, his reverence of mass culture and live feminine performance in discursive sites of “highbrow” cultural consumption, exemplified by the space he creates in his essay-chronicles that are included in his works Escenas de pudor y liviandad and Amor perdido. The chapter ends with an exploration of the Ateneo de Angangueo, a literary salon that spans the 1970s and 80s and is a prime extension of the tertulia from the first half of the century, but that seamlessly integrates prominent politicians into its exclusive network and meetings. Most apropos for the project, the Ateneo includes Mexican woman performer-turned-writer, Margo Su, in its ranks. Chapter IV and the concluding Coda ask how power dynamics turn away from male- dominated practices of owning, witnessing, and writing to embrace a female re- territorialization of performance and art. Whereas in the early 20th century, women were primarily the visual, bodily practitioners of cabaret—though some, such as Rivas Mercado, were creatively and financially autonomous, on top of providing emotional labor for high-profile members of Mexico’s literary and political sphere—many women became owners of dance halls, as well as campy performer-writers of the spectacular tropes activated in earlier years. Such a fact traces a lineage of subject formation through cabaret sociality and literary culture in vogue, as well as “queer formalisms” through the history of Mexico. One figure who dabbles in the roles of producer, patrona, and product is Margo Su. Starting her career as a dancer in Mexico City in the 1940s, Su and her husband co-manage theater and cabaret venues until well into the 1980s. In 1989 and 1991, Su pens two novels: Posesión and Alta frivolidad, which detail the links between Mexican politics, urban theater regulation, biopolitical surveillance, and the performance of posing transvestite bodies. Another important cabaretera in this lineage is Jesusa Rodríguez, playwright, performance artist, longtime cabaret owner, and current MORENA senator. Her cabaret production Sor Juana en Almoloya plays with traditional “highbrow” poetic and theatrical genres, as well as drag, to levy an incisive feminist critique of Mexico’s strict regulation of women’s creativity and bodily freedoms, from colonial times to the present. The dissertation ends with a brief “Coda” on the connection between tertulia and cabaret, and further, the marriage between performance and politics in Mexico, epitomized by the collaboration between Jesusa Rodríguez and her performing and life partner, Liliana Felipe. While scholars of contemporary performance have highlighted the importance of situating the productions of women in the context of burgeoning neoliberalism—an undoubtedly vital historicist move—it is equally important to link women’s creative energies to the local history of performance, to when the foundation was laid for official nationalist discourses about spectacle and the “modern” in a preceding boom of economic and political modernization. The bottom line is that women have been performing—and have been performed—far before the age of NAFTA. In conclusion, while the popular cabaret and the elite tertulia maintain an often tense— though generally productive—sociocultural relationship in the decades following the Revolution, by the end of the 20th century the two spaces and their conceptual repertoires subsume one another. Political subjectivity comes to be publicly claimed by vanguardist women in Mexico City who instrumentalize sensible experience in their labor; that is, workers of “the teatro frívolo”—and as best exemplified in the figure of the cabaretera— hone incisive sociocultural critique through popular dance and performance, and subsequently draw on such a foundation in order to participate in another sort of theater, Mexico’s political arena.

Advisor: Masiello, Francine
del Valle, Ivonne