Women’s History Month takes place in March, but exhibitions and events around San Antonio in October offer an informative, challenging and enlightening sequel.
San Antonio poet laureate Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson has joined with artist Aminah Decé for Return of the Matriarch, a hip hop project aiming to uplift women with their album titled Queendom Come.
Traitor, Survivor, Icon: The Legacy of La Malinche opens Oct. 14 at the San Antonio Museum of Art, with an accompanying performance of an immersive opera, La Malinche: Traitor/Savior by composer Nathan Felix. The performance is sold out, but the exhibition is accessible with regular museum admission.
Tamara Adira, performing artist and artistic director of performance troupe Arte y Pasión, presents Mercuria: On the Impossible Choices Women Must Make, a theatrical performance, Nov. 3 at the Brick at Blue Star Arts Complex.
La Malinche
The young woman who would come to be known as La Malinche was taken by conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1519 as a slave and allowed no voice of her own in historical records, though she became an indispensable and consequential component of the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonialization.
But as exhibition curators Terezita Romo, Victoria Lyall and Matthew Robb note in their catalog essay for Traitor, Survivor, Icon, they have not set out to repeat the familiar story of Cortés and the conquered Aztec empire of Moctezuma. Instead, they attempt to tell the story of “an enslaved indigenous girl who would become Cortés’ interpreter, cultural translator, mistress, and eventually the mother to his firstborn son” through her innate linguistic gifts and instincts for survival amid the chaos of war.
San Antonio poet Carmen Tafolla’s 1978 poem “La Malinche” is quoted in the introduction and exhibition and appears in the catalog in full. Tafolla said the scholars behind the show approached her for the poem because it was the first they’d seen that gives voice to La Malinche herself, with the opening line “Yo soy la Malinche.”
The poem succinctly captures why this historical figure has come to be so reviled and revered, depending on who regards her story:
My people called me Malintzín Tenepal
the Spaniards called me Doña MarinaI came to be known as Malinche
and Malinche came to mean traitor.
Her birth year is unknown, as is her birth name, the age at which she was enslaved (speculated to be preteen or early teens), or the year of her death. She might have justifiably considered her own people to be the traitors in this story, as her own family sold her to traders who then sold her to the Chontal Maya. The Maya were defeated by Cortés and gave him “gifts” including 20 young women, among them Malinche. Cortés had her baptized and christened as Doña Marina.
Through her formative experiences, she learned at least three languages, Nahuatl, Maya, and Spanish, and thus achieved a crucial position as interpreter in Cortés’ retinue as he marched his armies across what would become New Spain. She bore Cortés a son named Martín, and later married a Spanish nobleman and gave birth to a daughter named María.
This information is all in question, as the detailed introduction notes, and thus gives way to speculation and various agendas of colonial-era painters and scribes, 20th-century muralists and movie makers, and contemporary feminist artists, all of whom are included in this wide-ranging, comprehensive touring exhibition and publication.
The question of Malinche’s agency reverberates through accounts of her life and contemporary imaginings of her situation. While noted 20th-century Mexican writer Octavio Paz reviled Malinche for selling out her native peoples, Tafolla returns her agency, refuting the common curse word, meaning “screwed,” leveled at her heroine, and casting her as the self-possessed progenitor of a powerful new people:
But Chingada I was not.
Not tricked, not screwed, not traitor.
For I was not traitor to myself—
I saw a dream
and I reached it.
Another world……..
la raza.
Mercuria
Contemporary versions of La Malinche are in the news every day, with the rise of the #MeToo movement lending their stories due sympathy and credibility.
Arte y Pasión’s new Mercuria performance project drew together a group of women, each of whom has survived abuse and violence. Their stories and experiences are explored through a sequence of monologues, dance, music, and spoken word poetry by Tamara Adira, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, dancer Genevieve Obregón, vocalist La Memphi and guitarist Jose Manuel Tejeda, and flamenco artist Belén Maya, who Adira credits as an artistic mentor.
Through a collaborative process Adira described as “co-inspiration,” each artist introduced ideas for the performance based on their own experiences. Sanderson offered a poem titled “Washing Spoons,” describing how as a child her chore was to wash the spoons used by her drug-addicted stepfather. Obregón’s solo dance “Tientos” is about being stalked and surveilled by a hostile presence, while “Fly Away Bird,” combining poetry and dance by Sanderson and Maya, describes a metaphorical interior flight when physical escape isn’t possible.
Not only was Mercuria delayed twice by the coronavirus pandemic, but the project took years of development as Adira tentatively emerged from a 15-year experience of spousal abuse she described as “so deeply personal and so deeply destructive.”
Part of her hesitation was fear of reprisal by her abuser should she choose to take his abuse as a subject for her art.
She feared that “if I do something too loud, what is he going to do to the kids?” Such fear is nurtured by design, she said. “So when you see empowerment coming out of a situation like this, it’s always very tentative,” Adira said, “because an abuser will do everything they can to get their tentacles into every corner of your life, so that they have collateral,” a primary reason “why you don’t see women speaking out too much.”
But Adira is ready to present Mercuria as part of her healing process “because I think a lot of women need to see it.”
The performance will end with “Can’t Stand the Rain,” a dance that will bring the whole group together. “We’re dancing in the rain, and the rain symbolizes adversity that we’re facing.”
A portion of the $30 admission fee for the 7 p.m. performance will benefit local organizations working against domestic violence.
Queendom Come
Sanderson and Decé also adopt the theme of water for their Return of the Matriarch hip hop project, with the catchphrase “Water is life. Stay hydrated.”
“Hydration” is also the title of one of their songs on the new six-song album Queendom Come, released Oct. 11. The duo raps on the uplift of female empowerment, singing “We keep marching on ’til queendom come,” envisioning equality for women.
In the lyrics to the album’s first song “Floating Up,” Sanderson and Decé could be singing to La Malinche and other subjugated women across time and space: “My heart is built to pump your blood spilled centuries ago … the transfusion goes beyond something physical to something supernatural.”
