Mexican Hooker #1

by Carmen Aguirre

  “We may be fucked, but we’re happy.”

  That performance, and the circumstances I saw it in, would be embedded in my brain forever. I had been willing to break all the rules and risk everything to have a story told to me, and it had paid off. The play gave me the inspiration to continue. It contextualized why I had chosen to join a movement that sought to liberate my continent from the very oppression it depicted. It brought the Terror to its knees and filled me with joy, expanding my tiny universe of paranoia and letting in the light. It reminded me not to take myself so seriously, that the story was much larger than my own personal narrative, that I had put myself in a terrifying situation in order to serve a sweeping epic in which I was a mere player. And it showed me that that was worth doing. Those highly skilled storytellers had been able to articulate my own defining story, conjuring meaning out of raw experience. They took us into the dark and transcended the pain, reminding us that our stories mattered, their fierce commitment to social and artistic transformation exhilarating and life-affirming. I had known when I witnessed this play that if I hadn’t chosen to give my life to a cause, I would have dedicated it to the art of telling these kinds of stories.

  Now here I was in Vancouver following my calling, overwhelmed at the realization that terror, failure, and risk were a key part of actor training. I had been convinced that the artistry behind superlative storytelling was about feigning persuasively. Now I was finding out that a well-told story was most effective when there was no pretence at all, that a story affects us when the storyteller unmasks herself and seeks the truth in every moment. That truth seeking is by its very nature risk taking, and that risk taking can lead to failure. That often failure happens in front of an audience, and that a successful artist is simply someone who insists on doing her work, in spite of the failure and the public humiliation that comes with it. All of this was almost as frightening as taking the resistance oath and surrendering my life to the underground. I wondered, would I ever be able to do any of it?

  Halfway through the term, I was called into the school director’s office for a chat with her, the associate director, and the voice instructor. Everybody in the programme had a mid-term session to discuss and evaluate their progress. During my talk, it was mentioned that I was entering a racist business where more often than not I would be offered Mexican hooker and Puerto Rican maid roles. Was I sure that I wanted to continue?

  Incredibly, this came as a shock to me. Like many young, naive acting students, I had thought the theatre was a utopia free of racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism. It had never crossed my mind that the theatre was just like every other place in society. Moreover, I had assumed that I was an invisible minority to my all-white instructors, not a visible one, possibly because I was one of only three students of colour in the entire conservatory, made up of fifty mostly middle- and upper-middle-class white kids. But now my colour was being directly addressed, when I thought it had been washed out by all that whiteness. At least, that was the way I always felt until I left the confines of the conservatory, because the college was located in South Vancouver’s Little India. Whenever I climbed the stairs to the cafeteria and passed hundreds of other students dashing to class, half of whom were Asian and South Asian, I let out a sigh of relief and recognition and smiled at the passing faces.

  As for my fellow Latinos, they could be found in the form of a Guatemalan family, acquaintances from community events, mopping the college’s floors. The sight of them was always a jolt to me. It reminded me of my own 1970s Vancouver childhood, when my family would all pile into a beater and do the janitorial work together, sometimes late into the night. The sight of the Guatemalan family brought me back to who I really was, where I actually came from, and how far all of that was from my whitewashed Shakespearean acting life in the building’s basement. It was beyond me how I’d ever merge the two. Because it was beginning to dawn on me that if I was ever to succeed at risking vulnerability in front of paying strangers, that if I was ever to stage the stories I wanted to tell, compartmentalization (all I’d ever known, in both the North and the South) would have to go by the wayside. I would have to find a way to desegregate my life, to become whole and integrate it all in order to bare my true self.

  My teachers had meant to be helpful with their verbal reality check of hooker and maid roles. But I flew into a rage that lasted for my remaining three years at school. It was exhausting to be infuriated at my superiors all the time, convenient as it was. I could just blame them and their remarks on racism for my not being able to take a risk and be vulnerable onstage. No matter that that was wholly the actor’s responsibility, the blame could still be put on their white, middle-class privilege.

  So I wore a button on my Le Château red dungarees that proclaimed Token Minority and joined the college’s People of Colour Alliance, in a minuscule room adjacent to the Student Union’s building where brown students would congregate. The continent of Africa was painted on its door, and posters of Malcolm X (“If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success”), Muhammad Ali (“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life”), and Assata Shakur (“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them”) graced the walls. A couple of futons were provided for reading the many biographies of Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh that were stacked on the shelves, but they were mostly used for making out on while Public Enemy played on the ghetto blaster.

  A Salvadoran nephew of a Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) leader ran the joint. He wore a black leather baseball cap with a white X stitched on it, tiny silver hoops in his ears, and a necklace with a leather pendant in the shape of the African continent. Ernesto Cardenal’s collection Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems lived under his arm, and he skateboarded all over the city. His girlfriend was a Filipina-Canadian activist who wore long cotton skirts, mukluks, and a red beret.

  The one rule of the People of Colour Alliance was that no whites were allowed in. You could only cross the threshold if you identified as a person of colour. So as my classmates lined up for their cappuccinos, I would nonchalantly announce that I was going to the People of Colour Alliance. Usually there wasn’t a soul in the room, but at times I would come across the Filipina-Canadian activist power-napping, a pool of drool forming on the futon, “Fight the Power” blasting from the boom box. I’d raise my left fist to the posters on the wall while I sang along to the lyrics. Then I’d take a deep breath and run back to the land of reciting lines from the writings of dead white European men.

  As well as the racism of the business, another equally delicate matter had been raised during that mid-term session with my instructors:

  “We highly recommend that you go to therapy if you want to make it through the programme.”

  They were referring to my being seized by the memory of the rape in the now-legendary voice class. The rape was so taboo in my family that even Macarena and I hadn’t talked about it since my return to Canada. The staff mentioned post-traumatic stress disorder, and I froze. As far as they knew, the only trauma present in my body was that of the rape. They knew nothing of my MIR life of chronic terror, and they never would. I had taken the oath a mere four years earlier in Lima. In it, I had promised never to speak of the MIR to anybody. Not only that, I was no naïf when it came to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. My family’s phones had been tapped since the 1970s, we’d found a bug on the back of one of our shelves, and we knew that the secret police was the same everywhere; they had probably infiltrated the Chilean community in exile, and therefore nothing of great importance or detail was spoken of in our public events. Our private gatherings were on lockdown too; nobody shared any information there either.

  The Chileans who had returned south to join the armed resistance in the late seventies and early eighties, whether it was the MIR or the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, had left quietly, like us, vanishing from V
ancouver without a trace. Those who had stayed behind in the North, holding down the solidarity fort, were sworn to secrecy as to exactly whom the solidarity funds had gone to, and although there was an innate intimacy and understanding amongst us all, nobody asked questions and everyone looked the other way, even though the odd sound bite about resistance activity might be dropped at a cumbia dance party since the dictatorship had ended. Despite the struggle being over, and especially because we had lost, the unbreakable rule was still followed religiously: the less you know, the better. And you will take anything you do know to the grave. Period.

  I started to see a therapist near the campus. She was a middle-aged white lesbian in Birkenstocks to whom I unloaded the entire story of the rape in our first session. That’s what I was there for, so I figured I’d dive right in. She’d conclude that I was completely over it when she saw that I had no problem talking about it, my account littered with graphic detail. Instead, she said: “You just relived the experience as you told it. It’s as if it happened a moment ago. We have a lot of work to do.”

  The rape, until now confined to its solitary outer-space existence, crashed through the atmosphere, the force of gravity pulling it right to my core, where it left a gaping, burning hole, not unlike the one left by the fire on the Valparaíso hill on New Year’s Eve earlier that year, when exile had come to an end and the rape had been relegated to my northern identity, a satellite orbiting around that hemisphere’s constellations. Now it fell in flames from the sky and landed in the centre of my life. Resistance was futile. For the next two years, almost the entirety of my remaining time at theatre school, I didn’t menstruate.

  FOUR

  True to his word, Estéban had arrived in June 1990, three months after I’d left Argentina. Now it was December of that year, I was about to complete my first term, and he was still in deep culture shock. In the early 1990s, the Latino community was one of the poorest immigrant demographics in the city. When we went to a party, cumbia, considered low class in Argentina, was danced, and often recent refugees from other continents were invited. Most of the community were labourers, working as janitors, construction workers, mechanics, and dishwashers. Unlike most Latinos in 1990 Vancouver, Estéban was a Euro-Latino. Not only that, he came from the upper middle class, had centre, not left, politics, was not a refugee, and had never held down a regular job. He came from the Argentinian elite and hadn’t been aware of it, not unlike some of my peers at theatre school. Now he found himself being referred to as a minority, being told that he came from a Third World country (“What the fuck are these idiots talking about?!”), barely able to communicate due to his rudimentary English, driving a rusty second-hand car for his job as delivery man for a popular Indian restaurant on Kingsway, and hanging out with a politicized Latino community made up of mestizo and Indigenous members of resistance movements from all over the South. Many were survivors of concentration camps and mass killings, such as those from Guatemala, where over two hundred thousand Mayan people had been murdered by the right-wing, US-backed regime.

  The upper-crust lifestyle that was a given to Estéban seemed so far away, it was as if it hadn’t even taken place on the same land mass, much less only months before. Evidently, he was on a different planet altogether, where not only were the social signals of mainstream Canada the opposite of those in Argentina (“Why do these people jump when you touch them?”), whenever he did hang out with fellow Latinos, they came from a domain that had been invisible to him back home—the realm of political involvement. He was now immersed in stories that he’d read about in the papers in Argentina, even though in that country thirty thousand people had just disappeared. As for being surrounded by brown, working-class Latinos, it made him appreciate the maids in his parents’ house. On an outing to Gastown, Vancouver’s historic tourist quarter, the first thing he bought were T-shirts for them. For the first time in his life, he laboured. Not only was he a delivery man, he also painted houses and bussed dishes at a popular west-side bistro. As an undocumented worker, he worried he’d be caught and deported. Although the shock to his body and ego was intense, it expanded his world view and made him appreciate the work of the women who’d always been a blur to him, toiling in the background of his childhood home. Now they came into sharp, foreground focus.

  I spent at least twelve hours a day at school. First there were classes, from early morning until dinnertime. Then there was a short meal break, followed by crew calls. One made costumes, props, and posters, built and painted sets, and hung lights for the school’s productions. Sometimes the calls would go until two or three in the morning, until the work was done. Lying on the floor with a glue gun, pasting bead by bead to the bottom of a set piece at one in the morning, hair covered in glue, wrist shaking from exhaustion, dust in one’s eyes, knowing there were still hours to go, understanding that one would have to sneak into the costume room and sleep on an Elizabethan gown covered in mouse droppings before morning class without getting caught by the night security guard (a disenchanted Sri Lankan immigrant who had been a brain surgeon back home)—all of this was matter of course. After a certain point, going home was futile if one wanted to get at least a few hours’ sleep before the 8 a.m. theatre history class, and besides, there were no more buses and one was hanging by the thread of one’s meagre student loan and could not afford a cab. Complaining was out of the question; our conservatory was renowned not only for its “know thyself” motto, but also for being a boot camp of sorts, and one could be kicked out for having an attitude problem. Mondays were the one day off, spent doing homework, housework, laundry, and in my case therapy, where I avoided the now flashing-in-neon-lights-in-front-of-me, period-stopping rape and talked about my family history instead.

  The theatre was slavery, pure and simple, and our acting school was there to drive the point home (“If you’re not obsessed with the work, you’re not doing the work!” barked our mask instructor). It would take only a couple of terms to find out if it was indeed your calling or if you’d been attracted to the supposed glamour of the thing. In spite of the fatigue and fury the school engendered in me, I adored being a slave to the theatre. Whenever I walked onto the stage, even if it was to mop it before the show, my skin tingled. The thought of actually gracing the boards as an actor once I reached the higher terms made me euphoric, despite my being warned that roles would be limited and stereotypical once I graduated into the real world of professional theatre. In the meantime, I had to figure out a way to risk vulnerability every night while interpreting a playwright’s text in front of paying strangers. The risk I was being asked to take was so daunting, I had yet to find the edge of the cliff in order to jump from it.

  Going home covered in paint and plaster to shell-shocked Estéban, pontificating on the importance of alignment, spine rolls, vocal resonators, loose jaws, contact improvisation, verbing, Labanotation, authentic movement, Grotowski exercises, connecting to one’s sacral floor, the voice and body as sole instrument available to the actor, the deconstruction of scenes into objectives, tactics, units, and beats while he stared blankly at MuchMusic was akin to talking to a man who had just landed on the moon and was trying to figure out how to plant his flag on its strange surface. Not only did we rarely see each other, when we did, we were both so fatigued and dumbfounded for completely different reasons that it was virtually impossible to connect. My exhaustion and stupefaction was balanced by a feeling of elation; his was simply bone- and soul-crushing. I knew his experience and sympathized completely. He understood mine, because his calling had been basketball and he’d given his life to train and acquire the skills that had got him into the professional leagues.

  Our fighting continued, even though my sobbing fits were now confined to voice class, where they at least happened in the context of accessing the bottomless swamp of emotion that was required to be an actor. At the end of the term, I pounded on him so badly that in his effort to restrain me we ended up falling into the bathtub together and I got a concussion.
Right after Christmas, he went back to Argentina. Despite our relationship being a train wreck, splitting up was not on the table. We professed our undying love for each other and decided that once my second term was over, in May, I would go to Santa Fe to spend my summer holidays with him. We agreed that we would do this for the next three years. It was doubtful that he’d return to Vancouver.

  A month after Estéban left, in January 1991, I broke up with him over the phone. Blindsided, he demanded to know what was going on. All I could muster was something along the lines of fear, telling him that fear had overshadowed love when it came to him, that my fear of him was greater than my love for him. It was impossible for me to admit—to myself, much less to him—that the violence in our relationship had always come from me. Being raised as a radical feminist, I had interpreted that ideology to mean that the patriarchy was to blame for everything, that I could basically beat a man and still be considered the victim. I conveniently cast him as the villain, and talked myself into believing that I was afraid of him because the bathtub incident had given me a concussion, failing to examine what had come before, what had led us there, convincing myself of the theory that I was afraid of Estéban, that big, bad, sexist man. And I told him as much. He was devastated.

  Twenty-five years would pass before I saw him again and could apologize for the violence I’d felt entitled to take out on him.

  Every term there was a student-run evening called Performance Lab. The rules were basic; there were none. Students were invited to experiment as much as possible, to take things too far in a safe environment where no critics or paying audience were present. The audience would be made up of the school’s student body, and the staff would be invited to attend. Performance Lab was legendary. Plays that achieved success in the professional world had begun as five-minute seeds there. Students had found their voice, their guts, their confidence while trying something out on the Performance Lab stage. People sobbed, raged, took off all their clothes, or just stared out into the audience in absolute silence and stillness. Anything went. Most numbers were embarrassingly self-indulgent and hence crashed and burned. And that was all right. Because that was the point: to make a buffoon of yourself in a safe environment. Pushing boundaries was how you grew, how you learned.