RTC 31

LA ESCENA IBEROAMERICANA. MÉXICO-USA

JOURNEYS THROUGH THE MEXICAN HEARTLAND WITH IXTLAMATINIJ

By Adam Versényi
Theatre and Performance of the Americas Research Group (ASTR)

 

Let's take a journey, from the private suburban island of the Universidad de las Américas to the mountains of Hidalgo and the tropical heat of Huejutla. Let's take a journey, from the technologically advanced theatres of the U.S. to a resource poor large room in a secondary school in the hills of Huasteca. Let's take a journey, from the official story that paints México as a mestizo nation to a community's insistence upon its indigenous identity. Let's take a journey, from North American/Western European notions of what constitutes "good theatre" to a type of theatre embedded in the community that eschews professionalism in order to value cultural heritage.
In May of 2005, while serving as Resident Director for a new UNC Spanish Summer Immersion Program at the Universidad de las Américas in Puebla, México, I took such a journey with my friend and colleague Don Frischmann. We had been invited to a performance in Náhuatl of Ixtlamatinij, a play by Ildefonso Maya Hernández, which would take place the first weekend of our respective programs in Puebla. Not having travelled in México for several years I was struck once again by the incredible contrasts that any trip across the country entails. The Universidad de las Américas (UDLA) is a gated, private university that proudly displays its beautiful campus. At UDLA gardens abound, threaded by paths laid with Talavera tile and filled with flowers and sculptures. In addition to the various departmental buildings and a residential campus for faculty and administrators, many of which have been built with USAID money, UDLA also offers a library, wireless computer access, two gyms, a pool, an award-winning cafeteria and social center, tennis courts, and fields a U.S.-style football team. SACS-accredited, UDLA positions itself as an internationally-oriented university with professors from more than thirty countries on either the permanent or visiting faculty at any one time, and scholarship funds to support UDLA students studying at universities in the U.S., Europe, Russia, and Japan. Located in the town of Cholula, the site of the largest pre-Columbian pyramid in area, the campus is a short ride from the colonial city of Puebla, itself located approximately an hour and a half southeast of Mexico City. In short, as an upper middle class Mexican institution, whose tuition places it outside the reach of the majority of Mexican students, UDLA has created the look and feel of many U.S. colleges and universities. UDLA's infrastructure makes the U.S. student feel at home.
Catching a bus at Puebla's gigantic CAPU terminal, one of the busiest in central México, we travelled for five hours across the high desert region through Tlaxcala and into the mountains where we stopped at the alpine city of Pachuca northeast of Mexico City for the night. Capital of Hidalgo state, Pachuca is historically a mining center with a marked British flavor in architecture, cuisine, and sports all of which were introduced by the Cornish miners who came to the region in the eighteenth century to extract minerals and left behind both soccer and pastes, or the Mexican version of English pasties. From Pachuca we journeyed seven hours more through the beautiful mountain town of Mineral de Monte, its brightly painted houses and richly appointed plazas still illustrating its history as a gold and silver mining center; and over the breathtaking vistas and sheer drops of the Sierra Oriental, down into the tropical rainforest of the Atlantic coast to the provincial city of Huejutla, where we were met by two of the teachers working with the playwright and educator Ildefonso Maya Hernández. Bundled into a late model jeep, we were driven an hour and a half further into the jungle to the secondary school where the performance of Ixtlamatinij was to take place. An economically poor region, populated predominantly by Náhuatl-speaking Huasteca Indians, its climate, physical landscape, architecture, and attitude is not only geographically distant from the UDLA campus, but culturally worlds apart as well. While my U.S. students on the UNC program got to know their Mexican home stay families in the comfortable suburban neighbourhoods of Puebla, I met the primarily indigenous rural secondary students who would perform Ixtlamatinij in Náhuatl that afternoon utilizing the bare bones facilities available at their school.
"Ixtlamatinij" is the adjectival form of the Náhuatl "ixtlamati", meaning "judicious", "reasonable", "experienced", and signifies "discreet" or "prudent." The play's title encourages the audience to evaluate the judiciousness and discretion of its characters. The plot of Ixtlamatinij can be summarized as follows: On "Xantolo" or "Todos los Santos", November 2, an Indian family including Nichaj, her husband Kosej, and Nichaj's father Juantsi, prepare the traditional offerings. Epitacio, a bilingual teacher and the son of Nichaj and Kosej, arrives with his brother Nicolás. They have brought modern, western-style clothing that Epitacio demands his parents wear. He wants them to discard their traditional indigenous garb that, to his mind, makes them and him look backward, ignorant, and uneducated. Epitacio and Nicolás, both of whom are immensely proud of the fractured Spanish they speak and that sets them apart from their Náhuatl-speaking relatives, proceed to get drunk on beer while Epitacio demonstrates the "proper" way to wear mestizo or gente de razón clothing. The two of them then go off to meet their brother Cirilo, a soldier coming home on leave for the ceremony. Cirilo enters, having missed his brothers on the road. While he is the member of the family who speaks the best Spanish and has seen the most of the world outside of the Indian village, he also wears traditional clothing and exhorts his parents to return to wearing theirs when they embarrassedly appear in the clothing Epitacio has ordered they put on. With great relief the parents change back into their traditional dress. When Epitacio returns and sees what they have done he becomes enraged, shouting and cursing at them. Cirilo then hits his brother. In response, Epitacio pulls out a knife intending to take his revenge on Cirilo, but wounds his mother when she steps between them. Epitacio is taken off to be judged by the traditional Indian authorities of the community. Contrite, he returns wearing traditional garb himself, and the family reunites to complete the interrupted ceremony.
Ildefonso Maya's introduction to the script of Ixtlamatinij reads,

As Indians we are ashamed to see that we lack the wisdom and culture of the Spanish. We have already forgotten our culture and traditional Indian wisdom. This is how we think that the force of our representative culture has already been lost. We have lost it through our own ignorance. We have lost our values. The Spanish, and now the mestizos, have defeated us. For this reason we no longer appear anywhere. This is why when we enter school and begin to study, to learn to read and write, we begin to feel better because we think that we are liberating ourselves, becoming better people because we are leaving the Indian behind. That is when we begin to make fun of the stupid Indians because we have left ignorance behind. We no longer respect anything and we begin to think of ourselves as mestizos or Spanish and turn into violent people.

Ixtlamatinij is, in essence, a dramatic rendering of the points raised in Maya's introduction. The play gently satirizes Epitacio's attempts to act like a mestizo, one of the gente de razón. He not only speaks Spanish, but also adopts all of the external trappings of western clothing and behaviour, drinks to excess and resorts instantly to violence when he perceives a threat to his honour. While the play presents well-drawn characters, the dialogue flows reasonably well, and there are a number of humorous episodes, a good bit of the dramatic action and the play's conclusion are both rather predictable. No new ground is broken dramaturgically here.
The performance we witnessed was not, to say the least, theatrically exciting. Performed in Náhuatl by a group of secondary school students without any theatrical training and who had undergone minimal rehearsal, the pace of the production was choppy, the students often forgot their lines and had to be prompted by one of the four prompters scattered around the periphery of the playing area, and, with one or two exceptions, characterization was neither well developed nor defined. The conditions in the stiflingly hot performance hall, packed with spectators, were made worse by a smoky cooking fire onstage that wafted directly into my eyes throughout the performance. Eyes irritated, suffering from hunger because we hadn't eaten since early in the day, and sweltering in the suffocating heat, I applauded the production's conclusion more than its quality.
The play's end, however, was the beginning of the performance. The first row of seats had been reserved for honoured and invited guests, among which we found ourselves numbered. After the play concluded, the school's vice-principal introduced each of us by name, delivering a brief description of our titles and backgrounds. Each of the twenty of us was then invited up to the podium to give commentary or critique upon the work we had just seen. What quickly became clear was that, with exception of Don and me, everyone else so honoured was a former student of Ildefonso Maya. Each person now held a position of importance at either the municipal, state, or national level in areas ranging from political office, to labour organizing, to the Ministry of Culture. Each person who spoke had themselves as children acted in one of Maya's plays, or performed traditional dances he taught them, and each of them credited the cultural work he had done with them for inspiring their pride in traditional Huasteca cultural forms, and providing them with the self-confidence and dignity necessary to have achieved their current positions. By means of their very presence these men and women belied the path taken by those described in Maya's introduction to the play more than anything present in Ixtlamatinij itself. Maya himself then spoke, telling us that one of the reasons he rejects the term indígena and proclaims himself to be an indio, is that it is a constant reminder of the stupidity of the colonizing Spaniards who, believing they had reached the West Indies, called the inhabitants of the Americas "Indians." By attending Ixtlamatinij and commenting on the production, Maya's former students performed traditional Indian wisdom and became models for current students to emulate. At least an hour and a half after the play proper had ended we repaired to another building on the school's campus where the actors' families had prepared a feast of traditional regional dishes and where students, actors, families, and visiting dignitaries all commingled in a communal repast that mirrored the conclusion of Ixtlamatinij with its ceremonial meal that unites the family once more.
The following day we accompanied Maya to a Catholic seminary where he gave a class to the young seminarians in how to make decorative paper doilies out of multicoloured construction paper, a skill that he insisted would be of use to them as a means by which they could connect to the women in the congregations of the remote rural village churches where they would eventually serve. He then took us to his casa de cultura in the hills above Huejutla, a modest house that serves as a small museum for traditional Indian crafts, a storehouse for costumes and props for his various plays, a meeting place for the groups of teachers he trains to work in both rural and urban areas of Hidalgo state, a small lending library, and a workshop for Maya himself, who is also a talented painter.
Looking out over the magnificent view of Huejutla, Maya talked extensively about his life-long career fighting to preserve Huasteca cultural forms from a Mexican state apparatus that wants to subsume them into its iconographic image of a mestizo nation strengthened by a mixture of cultural, racial, and linguistic elements that is superior to any of those elements individually. Maya's other enemy has been the wealthy landowners who have denied the validity of Indian property rights and sought to degrade the environmental quality of Indian lands. Maya's own personal journey in this fight has taken him into mountain villages to learn traditional dances and teach art and theatre, to the halls of power where he sat down in the presidential office to discuss Indian rights with President León-Portillo, and has cost him greatly when his eldest son, a lawyer working to protect indigenous property rights, was gunned down by wealthy landowners. No one has ever been arrested for his murder although those responsible are commonly known. At seventy years of age Ildefonso Maya Hernández brings to his community seemingly indefatigable energy, despite the use of a cane. More important, however, is the conviction he instils that theatre and other cultural forms can be pursued not primarily for a beautiful aesthetic product created for audience consumption, but as a vehicle for both creating and preserving community. Both the economic basis of U.S. and Mexican commercial theatre, and the quest for professional quality that drives U.S. academic and regional theatre and Mexican academic and independent theatre, are eschewed for a vision of cultural creation not as an end in and of itself, but, akin to traditional indigenous ritual, as a transformative process for the participants, where what is of importance is the journey, not the destination.

 

Arriba | Volver