La Hija del Mariachi (The Mariachi's Daughter): The Best of Love and Rancheras

I try to convince myself that I haven’t posted in so long because I just haven’t felt inspired to write. The pathetic truth, however, is that I’m lazy. Now, happily, a bit of inspiration has arrived to shake me out of my sloth, inspiration not from literature but from the exquisite emotion and pathos of mariachi music.

Telenovelas, icons of Latino pop culture – I watch them to maintain my Spanish-language skills...

As if...

They’ve held me rapt in spite of myself ever since I lived in Ecuador over twenty years ago. The stories are frequently set in incredible places and audiences get treated to gorgeous views – beautiful countryside, charming colonial towns, tropical beaches, nighttime urban vistas. Then there’s the romance...the wooing, the sexual tension between two strong personalities, the beautiful men who cry so easily but with quiet dignity...the sentimental melodrama, the far-fetched plot lines, the frequent episodes of outrageous scenery chewing, the slapsticky humor. Telenovelas are, after all, soap operas...

One important thing about telenovelas makes them so much better than North American soaps: they end. Each telenovela ends and a new one begins. I watch a few episodes of each new one to check out the cast and the chemistry between the romantic leads, to get an idea of the plot. If I stick with one, it’s usually because I've noticed some unique quality about the production: a hot actor...

But there’s a novela running at the moment that’s unlike any other, a production of Colombia’s RCN network being shown on Telefutura (a “sister station” of Univision) here in the states - La Hija del Mariachi (The Mariachi’s Daughter). It’s the best written, best acted novela I’ve ever watched. It's so good that I rank it among the best TV shows I’ve ever watched, not far behind PBS’s Mystery! and Masterpiece Theatre, Homicide: Life on the Street and the first season of The Wire, and a few slots ahead of Six Feet Under and Rome (two more soap operas that got a lot more attention...).

The plot, of course, sounds rather ridiculous: Emiliano, a sophisticated yet somehow naive young man from a wealthy and powerful Mexican family is framed - by his business partners and lawyer no less, who are supposed to be his friends - for laundering drug money through his very high-end car dealership in Mexico City, and upon the advice of the unscrupulous lawyer, flees the country when the police raid the business, ending up in Bogotá, Colombia where he is mugged and robbed of his money and passport and left dazed and confused with a bleeding head wound to wander lost through the streets of the strange city until he happens upon a bar with a familiar name, La Plaza Garibaldi (the name of an actual park in Mexico City where strolling mariachis play everyday and where stands a statue of one of Mexico’s greatest composers of mariachi music, José Alfredo Jimenez), and suddenly, under the bright lights of the bar’s marquee, he sees standing before him the girl of his dreams, the beautiful, and as it turns out, very kind Rosario Guerrero, who takes pity on the lost but handsome young Mexican, believes him when he tells her his name is Francisco Lara (Lara – the last name of a famous mariachi singer/composer, Agostin Lara) and that he’s an auto mechanic who was just passing through Bogota on his way to a job in Argentina when he got mugged, dresses his wound, finds him a place to stay, gives him food and money, and who happens to be the one and only lady singer of the mariachi band at La Plaza Garibaldi and the daughter of one of its past stars (long since dead) and discovers that the young Mexican has a fantastic singing voice and helps him get a job as a singer in the band...and the Mexican becomes one of the stars at La Plaza Garibaldi and known to the loyal house audience as “El Príncipe de México” (The Prince of Mexico)...and he quickly falls completely in love with Rosario (and she with him) who is known on stage as “El Lucero de México” (The Star of Mexico)...and he becomes fast friends with the band’s lead violin player, Fernando Vladimir Molina, proud union member and son of a martyred union organizer, who’s so smart that he figures out pretty damn quick who Francisco really is and then sticks his neck out over and over again to help him, and is known on stage as “Mil Amores” (1000 Loves), an appropriate but frequently inconvenient nickname, and also with its lead trumpeter, Sigifredo de la Cruz, known on stage as “El Sentimentál” (The Sentimental One), older and wiser mentor to the young and foolish members of the band, who loves all things Mexican...and he gains an almost mortal enemy in the band’s lead singer and boss Manuel whom everyone just calls “Coloso” because his stage name is “El Coloso de Jalisco” (that’s “The ‘Colossus’ of Jalisco (the state in Mexico where mariachi music was invented).” My question is, “What exactly does “Colossus” refer to? – a colossal singing voice, a colossal presence on stage, a colossal...something else?? What’s really colossal about him is, of course, his villainous ego...) because he’s always wanted Rosario for himself...and he has to fend off the amorous advances of Virginia, the uber-spoiled, whiny, conniving daughter of the bar’s owner, and stop Rosario from being jealous of her...and he has to control his own jealous rages towards Rosario’s suitors, Coloso and a rich, pompous lawyer named Javier Macias who frequents the bar, even though he hates mariachi music, because he lusts after Rosario (and he’s married, the sleazy bastard)...and, of course, he has to stay one step ahead of the Mexican police, the Colombian police and Interpol who all believe that the young Mexican businessman has turned money launderer and is on the lam somewhere in Colombia.

So - its main plot line is the usual: two beautiful young people love each other passionately, but before they can live happily ever after, they have to overcome certain obstacles, primarily their own dopiness but also the evil intentions of several selfish people who, for various reasons, want to thwart their love. But La Hija del Mariachi has so much more:

A well-developed, well-acted friendship between two smart, witty men:

Mark Tacher (a Mexican actor) as Francisco/Emiliano is, of course, incredibly handsome and very charming, and he has great chemistry with Carolina Ramirez who plays Rosario. I like 'em, but they're just so sweet, really sweet, sickeningly sweet...

The best relationship in the show, an unusually interesting relationship for any tv show, is the one between Francisco and Fernando (Mario Duarte). The show could almost be called “Las Aventuras de Fran y Fer.” They first bond when Francisco helps Fernando fight off a gang of thugs who have hunted down the violin player to remind him again to stay away from his latest “amor,” a married woman whose husband is a mobster. But they keep getting into trouble together, especially after Fer figures out the truth about Francisco's identity. Fernando keeps a close watch on the internet for news stories about the police's search for the Mexican fugitive and listens with endless patience to Francisco's fears and heartaches. And he teases Francisco mercilessily, about his jealousy over Rosario, his "knack" for finding problems for himself, his inability to understand Colombian Spanish. The two actors make a talented comedy duo, with Tacher usually playing the straight man and Duarte improvising the funniest bits. While Tacher is almost too perfect in his Hollywood looks, Duarte has an unconventional handsomeness and his smile twinkles with so much charm that it takes female breath away.

As the show has progressed, these two have developed into sort of a macho male version of "Sense and Sensiblity."

Pertinent social commentary:

Novelas frequently tackle the ills that plague society at large - substance abuse, domestic violence and rape, child abuse, even mental illness. And, of course, the disparities between the rich and the poor. But the serious sociopoitical problems endemic to the country where one takes place usually don't crop up. Drugs cartels, kidnapping and political corruption rarely get mentioned in a Mexican telenovels. So I was almost shocked when Colombia's horrible history of murdered union members popped up in La Hija.... Early in the story, Fernando agrily laments to Francisco that his father had become another Colombian statistic as an assasinated union organizer. The revelation has never develped into a plotline, but the writers must have wanted to acknowledge the national problem.

Gay men have also long been portrayed in the macho world of telenovelas. As in all tv shows, these characters have been drawn with varying degrees of fullness and stereotyping, from the "swishy" comedian to the conflicted young man to the loyal friend of the heroine. While homophobia has been portrayed in a negative light, gay characters themselves have never been sexual towards each other. Finally, in LaHija..., two gay men have kissed each other in a romantic way. Granted, they were passing characters - one hired the band to serenade his lover - but it was the first gay kiss I'd ever seen in a novela, and I was impressed as hell.

Actors of African descent play characters who are not either servants or criminals.



Some of the greatest romantic music ever written – mariachi music – is integral to the story.

The story takes place mostly at night in La Plaza Garibaldi when the band is performing. It attracts a large loyal audience that knows the songs by heart and enthusiastically sings along (evidently, mariachi music is almost as popular in Colombia as it is in Mexico). The intrinsic romanticness of the music fits perfectly into a novela, and there are dozens of songs for each stage of a romantic relationship (granted, most are to be sung by men):

For the pre-relationship stage, there are the I’m-a-true-lover-of-women songs;

For wooing and declarations, there’re the polite Please-know-that-I-love-you songs and the more suggestive Just-wait-‘til-you’re-mine songs;

Then there’re are We-love-each-other-and-life-together-is-beautiful songs and the When-we-make-love songs...;

For when things turn to shit, there’re the You-broke-my-heart songs, I'm-no-good-for-you/I-don't-want-to-hurt-you-anymore songs, You’re-a-rotten-so-'n-so songs, Please-forgive-me songs, Please-don’t-leave-me songs, and She’s-left-me-and-I’m-not-going-to-survive-without-her songs.

The huge majority of these songs involve crying, drunkenness, dying of love, all three or in some combination. Francisco, Rosario and Coloso sing these songs and many more. They sing them to the audience and to each other, in duets and in duels (yep, duels). The band hires itself out for serenades and plays these songs to help the love-lorn citizens of Bogota with their romantic dilemmas.

I've been a lover of Latino culture, especially Latin music, for over twenty years, but failed to discover Mariachi music. Until now. Now I'm in permanent swoon for this music. Something about it has grabbed me and won't let go. It has a romantic aura about it similar to that of tragic opera. I can't really explain exactly how the two disperate genres are the same but the feeling I get when I listen to both is very similar so I know they both hit me in the same place in my soul.

Update:

La Hija... has, sadly, ended here in the States. For some really dumb reason, Telefutura decided to cut it short, even while the saga continues in Colombia. It was a dull, anti-climactic ending to the greatest of all telenovels. There will never be another like it. Look for it on dvd...

From the soap box: Read world literature and improve American foreign policy...

Valdimir Nabokov claimed that he translated Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin in order to move his readers “to learn Pushkin’s language and go through EO again without this crib.” Nabokov believed, according to writer David Remnick, that the translation of literature was an “impossibility” and an “insult.” Perhaps Nabokov had a similarly caustic opinion of the concept of “world literature,” since it is so frequently read in translation.

Other critics, however, have pointed out that we read literature in translation in order to expand our understanding of cultures not our own. While I agree with this point, I think more needs to be said about what the literatures of other cultures can teach us. During this time of our government's ever-expanding hegemony, we Americans should read the literature of other cultures in order to understand the effects of one country’s military, political and cultural dominance over another.

For most of the twentieth century, the translations of Western masterworks of prose and poetry entailed all that might have been included under the term “world literature” in the minds of most American. Any anthology would have reflected the Eurocentric concept of “the world” since it would have included no text from beyond the borders of Europe and North America. Beginning in the 1970s, however, the canon has gradually expanded to encompass the literature of the actual world. The latest edition of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, published in 2003, includes six volumes and literature translated from Japanese, Chinese, indigenous North American languages, Bengali, Hindi, Nicaraguan, Mexican and Chilean Spanish, Egyptian Arabic, and Martiniquan and Senegalese French, among other languages.

But even as the concept of world literature has expanded, translation itself has remained controversial. As Peter France has pointed out, no definitive set of criteria exists for judging the quality of a translation, and - as Nabokov perhaps proves - “many evaluations...are personal, metaphorical and hard to argue with.” Other critics admonish readers to remember that knowing the translation is not the same thing as knowing the original.

Translation is perhaps most problematic where colonial and post-colonial literatures are concerned. In her introduction to Masks of Conquest (a history of how literature was taught in Indian schools and colleges during British rule), Gauri Viswanathan describes how Sanskrit texts were banned in the early nineteenth century by the imperial authorities because their “immorality” and “impurity” were too dangerous for the Indian mind since it could not “discriminate between decency and indecency.” As this ridiculously condescending censorship was being imposed in India, audiences in England were enjoying immensely the translated versions of Sankrit poems and plays.

In her article “Imperialism and Sexual Difference,” Gayatri Spivak discusses how both the failure to translate and the translation of the language of a colonized people can play roles in the oppression of the colonized. In his story “William the Conqueror,” Rudyard Kipling frequently used Hindusthani words and phrases incorrectly. As Spivak points out, Kipling was using the pidgin Hindusthani of the British colonizers. He did not need to bother to translate it at all, much less translate it accurately, because the “narrative practice” of the imperialist power “sanctioned this usage.” The language of the servants was “not worth mastering correctly." At the same time, Kipling “painstakingly” translated the Indians’ speech in Hindusthani into “archaic and awkward English” and mocked their English with “phonetic transcription.” Spivak calls this “translation-by-violation.” She believes that this violation continues when “third-world” literatures are taught and critiqued from a state of “sanctioned ignorance” by professors or critics with no knowledge of the original languages or the actual societies and cultures from which the literature comes.

I don't think Spivak is discouraging the reading of third-world or post-colonial literatures in translation. Rather, she is pointing to the strong possibility that the erroneous discourses that we engage in from our positions within the culture that dominates much of the rest of the world will taint our well-intentioned reading of world literature unless we correct those discourses. The close reading of the literatures of Asia, Africa and Latin America - the areas of the world that have suffered under the political and cultural hegemony and imperialism of Europe and the United States - can at least begin to affect a change in the Eurocentric discourses, including those developed by Euro-ethnic America, on the rest of the world.

Much of the literature of Asia, Africa and Latin America deals in some fashion with the experience of living in these regions during and after colonization by an invading power. The term “post-colonial literature” - literature written after independence but frequently about the period of colonization - with its fluid definition, applies to this literature in translation, though it also includes texts written originally in English, French and other languages of the colonizers. Novels in translation from former colonies such as Algeria and Lebanon, as well as post-colonial texts written in English by authors such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya), Salman Rushdie (India) and Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka), all present the reader with narratives of countries at various stages of the struggle to reclaim their national identity from an imperialist power, either during or after colonization, or of individuals striving to discover, understand or adjust their own personal identities in relation to their participation in the national struggle.

Rather than one of the colonizer with the colonized, the relationship between the United States and Latin America is one of a hegemonic power and its victim. While Latin American literature may not be historically post-colonial, it can certainly be read as such. Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Nobel Laureate Miguel Angel Asturias of Guatemala and Sergio Ramirez of Nicaragua, to name just a few, have all written novels that deal with the repercussions of American military force and political and cultural hegemony in their countries.

Considering that the current focus of discourses on global relations and American military and foreign policies is the Muslim world, authors from this part of the world should be of special interest. Nobel Laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, of course, quickly come to mind, along with Nawal al-Saadawi (Egypt), Ahlam Mosteghanemi (Algeria) and Hanan Al-Shaykh (Lebanon). Tahar Djaout, another novelist, poet and journalist from Algeria, wrote about the militant Islamic fundamentalism that developed in his country after the end of French colonialism. He was assassinated by fundamentalists in 1993.

America has never been the ruler of a “traditional” empire. But it has occupied through military force, and taken great economic advantage of the nations that it has occupied. It has also controlled by political and cultural hegemony when not actually engaging in military occupation. It is this “non-traditional” empire - and the discourses developed and maintained by its power structures - that Americans must understand in order to begin to change it. Reading post-colonial literature and understanding narratives about the confrontations between imperialist or hegemonic powers and the countries they dominate, independence movements, and the repercussions and consequences of domination and independence can help Americans begin to change the hegemonic foreign policies and Orientalist-like discourses developed and maintained by previous generations.

Sources

Remnick, David. “The Translation Wars: How the Race to Translate Tolstoy and Dostoevsky Continues to Spark Feuds, and Create Small Fortunes.” The New Yorker November 7, 2005, 98-109.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Imperialism and Sexual Difference.” Oxford Literary Review 8:1- 2 (1986): 225-40. Rpt. in Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter New York: Bedford/St. Matins, 2000. 31-40.

Viswanathan, Gauri. “Introduction.” Masks of Conquest. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Rpt. in
Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter New York: Bedford/St. Matins, 2000. 60-68.

Impulse traveling...

I'm reading Mark Helprin's A Soldier of the Great War. I find certain elements of Helprin's style somewhat annoying, but the adventurous life of the main character, a young Roman named Alessandro Giuliani, and the novel's eclectic ideas make for very interesting reading. I'm not yet even a third of the way through the book (723 pages), but am inspired to comment on an event that happens early in the story. It's 1914 and Alessandro has joined the Italian navy, but there's a certain work of art he must see before he goes to war. He travels by train from Rome to Munich - into the war zone - just to visit Raphael's portrait of Bindo Altoviti, a wealthy young banker and friend of the artist, painted in the early 16th century.

Alessandro has just finished his Ph.D. in aesthetics - he was about to start a professorship in Bologna when the war intervened - and wants to contemplate the beauty of Raphael's work. In the passage, Helprin gives a brief history of how the painting traveled from Italy to Germany (by mule cart), describes the lovely museum and its Alpine surroundings, and puts into words the complexity that Alessandro sees in the face of the young Altoviti. I, on the other hand, simply enjoy the idea of jumping on a train and traveling for hours to see a painting...or a play, or an author's writing desk, or whatever may be at the end of the line.

Before I went to Dublin in January of last year, I happened upon Jonathan Harr's recent book, The Lost Painting, about "The Taking of Christ," one of Caravaggio's many "lost" masterpieces, and how it was discovered and restored. It now lives at the National Gallery of Ireland. I still haven't read Harr's book, but I saw the painting while in Dublin. It's the first Caravaggio I've seen. I was fortunate enough to see another while in Russia in June - "The Lute Player," the only Caravaggio at the The Hermitage in St. Petersburg. I won't attempt to describe the beauty of these paintings, but I can envision traveling the world just to see every Caravaggio (there are only between 60 and 80, according to Harr, at least until more are discovered). Alessandro's impulsive trip seems only natural.