Maria and Me: An Homage to the Image by by Adriana Alba-Sánchez

Maria and Me: An Homage to the Image

by Adriana Alba-Sánchez
Editor, emeritus

Maria Felix died last Monday. I found out upon getting home, after I kicked off my shoes, flopped down on the couch, and turned on the tube to see Vicente Fox standing somberly next to an oak coffin between vases of long Calla Lilies and surrounded by a hoard of politicians, celebrities and cameramen. It took a while before I realized that all the escandalo was because Maria Felix was dead.

As expected, for the next couple of days Spanish Network Channels have paraded one homage after another to the Mexican Icon. Article upon article has already been written about her film career, her numerous lovers, her arrogant political commentary, her art collections, her life in Europe, the elite circles she ran with; so I don't want to go there. I want to write about Maria and me. No one has covered that angle yet.

My father was always a big fan of all films that came out of Mexico's "Epoca de Oro." When I was a child, it was a Sunday ritual to go to the local video store and come home with a stack of black and white films that featured Mexican men in full splendor-on top of a horse with two guns swinging from their hips and a mournful ranchera dancing out of their throats. I don't remember the first time I saw the sickle shaped brows that arched above those infinitely dark eyes staring down Pedro Armendariz, Jorge Negrete, or Pedro Infante. It was before my mind developed the ability to organize memories and images, but the flaming rage and relentless pride that glowed from the depths of her gaze had a haunting and contagious flicker.

This admiration for the black and white image that graced the screen of our thirteen-inch T.V. was a reaction to a deep suspicion. At that young age I was looking around trying to figure out what it would mean for me to be a woman. Everything that I saw and heard in real life was teaching me that woman's role was to find a man and be a mother. Women (especially Mexican women) were supposed to be delicate and nurturing, accepting and always loving. Our power was that we kept men's worlds in meticulous order--washed, ironed and folded neatly in their drawers.

I must have been ten the day I turned to my mom and declared, "I want to be like Maria Felix when I grow up." My mom responded to my articulated desires with, "Esa vieja es una vulgar." To her she was vulgar because Maria was vicious and always ready to strike any "canalla" that tried to impose his rule on her. She smoked and dressed like a man in movies, she led wars, she ran her own ranchos and had a deep voice that demanded nothing less than full command. She was not the "Patron's" dutiful wife. She was La Patrona, (or the boss) in the fullest sense of the word. She was not a Mexican Marilyn Monroe, simply oozing with sex and filled with bubbly giggles. She was not blonde and never played delicate or helpless women like the ones I saw in telenovelas every day. La Doña never lowered her eyes for anyone. If that type of independence signified vulgarity, I wouldn't mind the notoriety.

In real life she really was arrogant and self-righteous as hell. Quick to criticize everything around her, she once even went so far as to call Subcomandante Marcos a clown and the Zapatistas "Indios apestosos." Her elitist rhetoric offended me. I felt angry and betrayed, let down. I had to learn to take her for what she really was: a Mexican post-revolutionary creation, much like the PRI. She got rich by playing the heroine that symbolized nationhood in 20th Century Mexico. She was propaganda!

I know that now, but I still feel the same knot in my stomach when I see her in "La Generala" or "Enamorada." From that image of female rebellion I learned that my biology was not my destiny. The fact that I was born with ovaries did not mean that my life would have to be marked with self-sacrifice and sufrimientos.

There are images that come about in our lives that are transformative. They are initially shocking and hauntingly linger inside of us. They are representations of deep inner desires; some truth we feel born with and remains buried until we are able to somehow connect it to something outside of our own skin. Such was La Doña to me.