Death in American Texts and Performances

Corpses, Ghosts, and the Reanimated Dead

Mark Pizzato, Lisa K. Perdigao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754669074
• eBook ISBN: 9781317154440
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How do twentieth and twenty-first century artists bring forth the powerful reality of death when it exists in memory and lived experience as something that happens only to others? Death in American Texts and Performances takes up this question to explore the modern and postmodern aesthetics of death. Working between and across genres, the contributors examine literary texts and performance media, including Robert Lowell's For the Union Dead, Luis Valdez' Dark Root of a Scream, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman, Thornton Wilder's Our Town, John Edgar Wideman's The Cattle Killing, Toni Morrison's Sula and Song of Solomon, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Falling Man, and HBO's Six Feet Under. As the contributors struggle to convey the artist's crisis of representation, they often locate the dilemma in the gap between artifice and nature, where loss is performed and where re-membering is sometimes literally reenacted through the bodily gesture. While artists confront the impossibility of total recovery or transformation, so must the contributors explore the gulf between real corpses and their literary or performative reconstructions. Ultimately, the volume shows both artist and critic grappling with the dilemma of showing how the aesthetics of death as absence is made meaningful in and by language.

PART I
Studying the Corpse

Chapter 1
A Representation of Death in an Anti-Vietnam War Play by Luis Valdez: Dark Root of a Scream1

Jorge A. Huerta

If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess… strength without sight.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., 1968

Today, the sixteenth of September, the day of independence for all Mexican peoples, I declare my independence of the Selective Service System. I accuse the government of the United States of America of genocide against the Mexican people… of creating a funnel which shoots Mexican youth into Vietnam to be killed and to kill innocent men, women and children.

Rosalío Muñoz, 1969 (217)

I might even get killed. If I do, they’ll bring me back here in a box, covered with the flag…..

“Johnny,” Soldado razo Luis Valdez and the Teatro Campesino, 1971 (Valdez, Early Works 123)

The 1960s and 1970s were a turbulent time in the history of the United States, especially for its marginalized citizens. The incipient Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s rallied people from all ethnicities and walks of life, and by the mid-1960s many of those same people marched against what they perceived to be an immoral war in Vietnam. A “conflict,” as it was dubbed by the politicos, had become, by 1968, a full-fledged war that tore families and communities and the country itself apart. Few people outside the Latino communities knew then and fewer still know today, that a disproportionate number of Chicanos were dying in Vietnam (Guzman 12–15).2 Also little-known outside the barrios, Chicana and Chicano activists were marching and rallying, hoping to alert the community to the gross injustices of the war as thousands of Chicanos were being drafted. Misinformation was the norm, but activists and artists from all communities were not standing-by; they would not let themselves be silenced by the government from protesting the slaughter.

One such activist was Luis Miguel Valdez, an undergraduate student leader at San Jose State College, California, in the early anti-Vietnam War Movement. Valdez was a popular and charismatic speaker on campus and in the community during the early 1960s, who initially aligned himself with Castro’s Marxist Revolution. As a member of the first group of US students in the “Venceremos Brigade”3 to Cuba in 1964, Valdez was energized by the revolutionary fervor he and his friend, Roberto Rubalcava, witnessed. The two wrote: “The Mexican in the United States has been, and continues to be, no less a victim of American imperialism than his impoverished brothers in Latin America” (Valdez and Steiner 215). In his analysis of this statement, Jorge Mariscal observes, “Valdez and Rubalcava situated Chicano issues within the larger context of Latin American history, and argued that ‘the example of Cuba will inevitably bring socialist revolution to the whole of Latin America’” (Brown 110). As the son of migrant Mexican farm workers, Valdez knew all-too-well a life of poverty, displacement and struggle in his own country. He witnessed hardships daily and aligned himself with his fellow Mexican, Filipino, and Chicano farm workers. But Valdez’s world-view was also informed by his Yaqui mother who inspired interest in his indigenous roots from an early age; this would influence his later creative and political work as well.

Valdez’s first full-length play, The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, was produced at San Jose State College in 1964 while he was a student.4 I believe it is important to begin with this play because it is Valdez’s first such effort and also because it stands in sharp contrast to the aesthetic journey the playwright would undertake during the next three years. Between 1964 and 1967 Valdez developed two distinct theatrical forms, the acto (in collaboration with his troupe) and his own vision, the mito, or myth. In the playwright’s words, the acto is the Chicano “through the eyes of man,” while the mito is the Chicano “through the eyes of God” (Valdez, Early Works 11). It is his first mito, Dark Root of a Scream (1967),5 which is the focus of this study, for it signals the beginning of Valdez’s fascination with Aztec and Maya mythical iconography re-configured within a contemporary Mechicano6 setting.7 What I intend to do here is to discuss this mito as an example of one playwright’s Mexican/Chicano view of Death in a time of great crisis for the country as well as for the Chicanos and Mexicans living in the United States.

A Search for Identity: The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa

In his preface to the published version of The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa, Valdez prepares the reader and production team for the style he envisions: “The play therefore contains realistic and surrealistic elements working together to achieve a transcendental expression of the social condition of La Raza en los Estados Unidos [Mexicans/Chicanos in the United States]…. In short, it must reflect the psychological reality of the barrio” (154). This play revolves around the central figure of Belarmino, a character who has no body and claims to be the lost head of Pancho Villa. For the twenty-four-year-old Valdez, the Chicano reality could only be expressed through the surreal (a bodiless head) juxtaposed with characters and situations that are also extensions of reality.

One of the most perplexing images in this play is created by the cockroaches that grow ever larger, crawling all over the walls, in true surrealistic fashion. Worse, Belarmino’s sister, Lupe, feeds these repulsive creatures to him and eventually eats them as well. You do not have characters eating cockroaches in your play without expectations. Expectations that your audience members will not soon forget the imagery, and the hope that they will think about what they have just witnessed. I believe this is Valdez’s metaphor for what he terms “the psychological reality of the barrio”: confusion created by displacement.

The young writer employed exaggeration for political reasons. Belarmino claims to be the head (posthumously decapitated) of the Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa, and politicizes the hero, Joaquin, who represents the revolutionary Chicano. Joaquin is the most sympathetic character, the misunderstood “vato loco,” a disenfranchised street youth in constant trouble with the authorities and in conflict with his brother Domingo, who transforms into “Mr. Sunday” in his total rejection of Mexican and Chicano culture. After spending time in jail for robbing supermarkets to feed the poor, Joaquin comes home without a head. The juxtaposition of the bodiless head and the headless body is clear: combine them for a complete, revolutionary man. It is the playwright’s hope that the confusion he perceives in the barrio will be replaced by a political consciousness, his “psychological reality” more informed by an awareness of marginalization than by Freudian analysis. Valdez’s characters and the situations in which they find themselves are representative of the playwright’s dislocation, which he believes is universal to working class Mechicanos.8

In Valdez’s early vision, the mystery of Belarmino’s condition is not determined by supernatural forces, but, rather, by the playwright in his attempt to educate, to entertain and to horrify. Years after the first production of the play, Valdez told an audience that his older brother was the model for Mr Sunday and that he (Luis) is represented in the character of Joaquin. He then admitted: “people didn’t exactly get it… the horror, the horror of watching a brother become a stranger and the horror of watching somebody get their head cut off” (Valdez, Keynote Address). In the fall of 2005 Valdez revealed that his first play was actually influenced by Ionesco and the absurdists, something I had never previously read or heard from him.9 Whether surreal or absurd, for the young playwright his play was a visceral response to the loss of a brother to total acculturation through denial of his Mexican heritage, and the loss of cultural identity through brainwashing symbolized by decapitation. There is one actual death in this play when the alcoholic father apparently gets killed by a train. But the metaphoric death of the brother, Domingo/Mr Sunday, was a more powerful and enduring image in much of Valdez’s (and subsequent Chicana and Chicano playwrights’) works. In many ways, this experiment in playwriting set the tone for all of Valdez’s later works, none of which can be termed realistic.

Taking the Revolution to the Fields of California

After graduating from San Jose State College in 1964 Valdez joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe under the direction of Ron Davis. This Marxist collective introduced Valdez to street theatre, to commedia dell’arte with a social message. In the fall of 1965 he and a group of striking farm workers founded the Teatro Campesino as the cultural and educational arm of Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta’s fledgling farm workers’ union. Much has been written about the early days of the Teatro by this author and many others. Most importantly, the aesthetic trademark of the early group became the collectively created actos Valdez guided as he and his farm workers-cum-actors improvised scenarios aimed at getting other farm workers to join the Union. Using minimal props and costumes, while wearing masks and signs around their necks to identify their place in the social strata (“Farm Worker,” “Boss,” “Scab,” and so on), the Teatro actors educated and entertained their fellow union members and prospective members.10

Valdez and the Teatro members made the difficult decision to leave the ranks of the farm workers’ union in 1967 in an attempt to focus on their craft. This was especially important for the director/playwright, who needed the time to write his own plays. The Teatro would never abandon the farm workers’ issues and many subsequent works would feature farm workers and their families in crisis. But you cannot run a fledgling theatre company and a growing farm workers’ union as well. The call to write beckoned Valdez and he answered it as he began to develop his mitos, which meant a return to his indigenous roots.

The Chicano Artists Discover the Aztecs

Before turning to Dark Root of a Scream, I believe it is important to trace the roots of a Mexican/Chicano view of Death. The subject of death and the mystery that surrounds it have been around as long as there have been people to witness and wonder at the moment someone dies. The Big Question—Where do they go?—can only be answered by theology or myth. Some cultures believe in an afterlife, others see death as the end of life. Today, we refer to someone having “passed away,” which connotes a journey, a passing to the “hereafter” of some kind, to “the Other Side.” In a classical European world-view, we recall the myths of the Greeks with their Hades and their River Styx. Christian thought changed that concept and offers a variety of scenarios for an afterlife. But to understand the Chicanos’ views of life and death, one must turn to the indigenous cultures of Mesoamerica. That is what the Chicano artists began to do in the 1960’s: create or re-create a Chicano mythos based on Mexican and Pre-Columbian heroes and myths.

Most prominent and visible among Chicano artistic expressions of the early period were the murals painted on public buildings, meeting halls, housing projects, and the like all over the southwest.11 Many of these murals portrayed revolutionary icons such as Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, or Pancho Villa. Others recreated Mexico’s Patron Saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or Aztec and Maya pyramids and mythical figures in an effort to give their Chicano brethren a sense of their ancestors’ rich history. However, a mural or painting can only tell the viewer so much. And even though “a picture is worth a thousand words,” those words may be lost if the person viewing the image has no references, no connections to that image. Study a painting of Quetzalcóatl, the “Feathered Serpent,” and you may only see what appears to be a snake with feathers. The snake as symbol has many meanings, of course, but what of the feathers? Where are the wings? What does it all mean to a contemporary Chicana/o who has probably been taught through Christian narratives that indigenous religions are pagan and that the snake is a symbol of evil?

Given the various recreations of indigenous symbols I have seen on numerous murals in barrios throughout the US, it becomes clear that if visual artists do not provide a narrative, it is up to the writers, poets, songwriters, and playwrights to give those images and concepts a place in the Chicano imaginary. In his introduction to a special issue of El Grito dedicated to Chicano drama in 1974, Herminio Rios-C wrote: “It is indeed impossible to understand many Chicano literary works without a knowledge of Nahuatl [Aztec] and Mayan mythology. Many Chicano writers are exploring this part of our history and are actualizing it in terms of contemporary realities” (6).

Something strange happens when the Mechicana/o playwright has to educate audiences about their Mexican history and mythologies, substituting Aztec or Maya beliefs for the more familiar European myths. As Herminio Rios-C stated a generation ago, Mechicano audiences do not automatically recognize or identify with Aztec and Maya gods and goddesses. Indeed, most people cannot pronounce names like Quetzalcóatl, Itzamná, or Coyolxhaqui, much less identify with them. But that was the challenge to those playwrights who wanted to bring the gods back to their contemporary Mechicano audiences: to transform Zeus into Itzamná, substitute Guadalupe with Tonantzín and replace Mount Olympus with Teotihuacán. That is what Luis Valdez chose to do, setting a mythico/historical quest for himself and his communities.

The Aztecs and Death

In the words of David Iguaz, “Death in ancient Aztec Mexico formed an integral part of daily life and was considered just a further stage in the continuation of life towards the individual’s final resting place. Death was to be found everywhere in the form of sacrificial rites, religious rituals, mourning celebrations and funerary festivities” (Iguaz 63). In his seminal book on the Mesoamericans, Pre-Columbian Literatures of Mexico, Miguel León-Portilla writes of the Aztecs: “There is also ample proof in the codices and Náhuatl poetry that the Ancient Mexicans gave considerable thought to death…. [T]here are many references to death in battle, death of the victims who were sacrificed…” (83). León-Portilla notes that in their poems the Aztecs saw death as both a dreaded mystery and as a kind of release. One poem begins:

Given over to sadness

We remain here on earth.

Where is the road

that leads to the Region of the Dead,

the place of our downfall,

the country of the fleshless?

and ends with the following image:

I will have to go down there;

nothing do I expect.

They leave us,

given over to sadness. (León-Portilla 85)12

León-Portilla then contrasts this poem with the following, more hopeful vision:

Truly I say:

certainly it is not the place of happiness

here on earth.

Certainly one must look somewhere else,

where indeed, happiness will exist.

Or only in vain have we come to the earth? (86)13

The third example of an Aztec death poem cited by León-Portilla fits the theme of Valdez’s play even more.

Thus the dead were addressed,

when they died.

If it was a man, they spoke to him,

invoked him as a divine being,

in the name of pheasant;

if it was a woman, in the name of owl;

and they said to them:

“Awaken, already the sky is tinged with red,

already the dawn has come,

already the flame-colored pheasants are singing,

the fire-colored swallows,

already butterflies are on the wing.”

For this reason the ancient ones said,

he who has died, he becomes a god.

They said: “He became a god there,”

which means that he died. (62)14

Not only the dreaded mystery and hopeful release of death, but also its divine dimension, as expressed by the Aztecs, can be found in Valdez’s play–along with its Mayan roots.

The Quiché Maya and Their Popol Vuh

In 1968, the year after the first production of Dark Root of a Scream, a Mexican anthropologist, Domingo Martínez Parédez, published his controversial book, El Popol Vuh tiene razón: teoría sobre la cosmogonía, preamericana [The Popol Vuh is Correct: A Theory of Precolumbian Cosmogony]. The Popol Vuh is perhaps the most discussed of pre-Columbian writings because it stands alone as a Quiché Maya book of origins. Martínez Parédez raised the eyebrows of the academy ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Studying the Corpse
• Part II Tracing Ghosts
• Part III Reanimating the Dead
• Index