Ricardo Rivera with Mariachi Aztlán. Foto: Todd Rosenberg
Carlos Monsiváis, the late chronicler of Mexico City, credited José Alfredo Jiménez with uprooting mariachi music from its rural origins and adapting it to an urban setting. Not a small feat, considering that city folk in Mexico, especially in the capital, have traditionally looked down on the rest of the country.
Perhaps in years to come, when more venues open their doors to mariachi and opera, something similar will be said about the collaboration of José “Pepe” Martínez and Leonard Foglia, this time beyond Mexican borders. Saturday night in Chicago’s Civic Opera House, we had a rare chance to experience a fusion of two dissimilar genres that surprisingly seemed rather natural. So natural indeed that, in between scenes, instead of noticing the ornate architecture of the majestic building, a man behind me commented that one of the characters had forgotten the last step in the preparation of the traditional Mexican tamal: Se le olvidó embarrar la hoja (“She forgot to spread the masa on the husk”), he whispered to his companion.
El pasado nunca se termina is a story about changing times and attitudes. It opens in 1910 in the state of Morelos right after the appearance of the Halley Comet. This astronomical event occurred during a year when the thought of revolution had already seized the conscience of most Mexicans and was boiling actively through their arteries. In the imagination of some of the opera’s characters, the appearance of the comet was a sign of times to come, one that foretold social upheaval and bloodshed and transformation. The mass of the population had been living under conditions of servitude and peonage for far too long and was ready to burst in a collective cry —¡Ya basta!
The stories of this period of Mexican history tend to present characters on either side of the traditional dichotomy of the good and the bad: campesinos contra hacendados. Since the beginning of El pasado, however, we realize that something else is at play here. True, the hacendados are guilty of arrogance and ignorance and greed. But, as the story unfolds, rather than awakening our animosity for the rich and powerful, we are shown a portrait of their humanity. The main goal of the couple at the hacienda, for instance, is the wellbeing of their only son, a genuine desire for him to attain his full potential.
On the side of the exploited, one of the characters, Xihuitl, whose Nahuatl name means either “comet” or “year,” knows well the lessons of space and time. He is a visionary and a reservoir of ancient wisdom. Rich or poor, he sings in a line that could come straight from Leopardi, there is no one that time, in the end, will spare.
But if we are not time, then what are we?
And it is time, this complex and liquid and maddening thing that defines us and gratifies us and dooms us that El pasado conveys so well. Or rather, it manages to make it disappear: one moment we are on the eve of armed conflict, and then we are in a prosperous and cosmopolitan city; one moment we witness the end of life, and then we are granted a glimpse of the cyclical rules of the heavens, or eternity; one moment we are in the presence of despair and uncertainty, and then we are listening to a speech full of hope and promise.
Powerful and ambitious, El pasado draws a direct trajectory between the deep astronomical knowledge of ancient Mexico and the bright future of a political career in Chicago.
Mr. Foglia set himself to write a story depicting our past without realizing how potently it would reverberate in our present —from the outrage of the ¡Ya basta! in contemporary Mexico to the possibility of a first Mexican mayor in Chicago. Or maybe both Mr. Foglia and Mr. Martínez did know that, by examining and recreating our past, they could address our present and hint at our future, which would explain the title of the opera. El pasado nunca se termina is, after all, another way of saying that our present is not yet complete, and that we are a work in progress.
March 29, 2015
Cassandra Zoe Velasco, Daniel Montenegro, and Luis Ledesma. Foto: Todd Rosenberg
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José Ángel N., author of Illegal: Reflections of an Undocumented Immigrant
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