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. Through a collaborative process Adira described as “co-inspiration,” each artist introduced ideas for the performance based on their own experiences. Mercuria is a collaborative performance exploring abuse and violence each artist has experienced. 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. 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:Ĭontemporary versions of La Malinche are in the news every day, with the rise of the #MeToo movement lending their stories due sympathy and credibility.Īrte y Pasión’s new Mercuria performance project drew together a group of women, each of whom has survived abuse and violence.
The question of Malinche’s agency reverberates through accounts of her life and contemporary imaginings of her situation.
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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. She bore Cortés a son named Martín, and later married a Spanish nobleman and gave birth to a daughter named María. 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. The poem succinctly captures why this historical figure has come to be so reviled and revered, depending on who regards her story: 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.” San Antonio poet Carmen Tafolla’s 1978 poem “La Malinche” is quoted in the introduction and exhibition and appears in the catalog in full. 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.
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.īut 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. 3 at the Brick at Blue Star Arts Complex. 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.
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