Deadness and the Post-Mortem Imagination in Gabriela Ortiz’s ¡Únicamente la verdad!
On the evening of August 8, 2008, the Buskirk-Chumley Theater of Bloomington, Indiana, opened its doors for the premiere of ¡Únicamente la verdad! (Only the Truth), the first opera by Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz (b. 1964). The work is a video-opera that was announced as the authentic story of Camelia la Texana, the main character of Los Tigres del Norte’s classic narcocorrido (drug ballad) “Contrabando y traición” (Smuggling and Betrayal). The opera’s libretto was written by the composer’s brother, Rubén Ortiz Torres (b. 1964), a visual artist based in San Diego, California, and the premiere was conducted by Carmen Helena Téllez (1955-2021), who also co-produced it with Marianne Kielian-Gilbert.
Narcocorridos stem out from Mexican corrido (ballad) tradition. While traditional corridos celebrate the deeds of popular heroic figures, narcocorridos focus on chronicling the lives and adventures of real or fictitious drug lords. Originally, corridos and narcocorridos were popular mostly among the Mexican rural working classes (especially in the north of Mexico) and among Mexican migrants in the United States. This situation generated corridos’ typical representation as folkish, unsophisticated forms of musical entertainment. However, the songs’ ubiquitous presence in Mexican media since the 1990s, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) changed the cultural dynamics between the country’s center and periphery, led to them also becoming a guilty pleasure of sorts—a cool type of kitschy indulgence—for turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Mexican middle- and upper-class consumers.
Although there was a long tradition of corridos about smugglers before “Contrabando y traición,” the composition of this song in 1972 by Ángel González (neé Estanislao Rivera Varela; 1930-2005) and its release in Los Tigres del Norte’s homonymous 1974 album, is widely credited with igniting the massive popularization of narcocorridos in Mexico and Greater Mexico at the end of the twentieth century. In this song, Camelia’s character challenges the representation of women in traditional corridos as passive, submissive, and largely defined by the men around them. Here, Camelia, who has helped her lover, Emilio Varela, smuggle marihuana into the United States and sell it in Hollywood, ends up killing him after feeling disrespected. When the drug transaction is done and they receive payment, Emilio tells Camelia that each should take their part of the money and part ways since he plans to leave her for his true love.
Camelia’s response is famously represented in the song by the sampled sound of seven gunshots (“sonaron siete balazos”) that end Emilio’s life. One could argue that the popularization of the main character of “Contrabando y traición” in the Mexican popular imagination happened as a result of her embodying a type of female assertiveness that was often absent in Mexican popular music precisely at the moment in which narcocorridos became pervasive in Mexican media. Thus, although Camelia la Texana developed into an icon of female empowerment that “sparked the ‘border imagination’ about a strong woman who speaks and acts for herself; [an o]utlaw and outcast, [who] disappeared into the social fabric and then surprisingly began to take on new forms,” as the press release of the premiere of ¡Únicamente la verdad! suggests, the mythology about this captivating character should also be understood within the dynamics generated by the middle and upper classes’ consumption of these music styles as kitsch.
Ortiz’s opera does not begin with Camila and Emilio crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in San Isidro, as the original song’s saga famously begins. Instead, the opera starts with a video playing in the background as the orchestra plays an electroacoustic overture that transports the audience to Ciudad Juárez to witness the death by decapitation of Eleazar Pacheco (content warning [CW]: there is a stylized decapitation at the end of this clip]. Pacheco was an abused undocumented worker who committed suicide by throwing himself to the railway tracks. Or at least that is the story told by ¡Alarma!, a crime tabloid which printed gruesome pictures. Its claims at offering its readership “únicamente la verdad” (the title of Ortiz’s opera is the tabloid’s infamous motto) became a trademark of Mexican sensationalist journalism until it folded up in 1986. The opera’s electroacoustic overture is followed by an orchestral overture and a series of scenes and interludes that equally set to music media news announcements, blog criticism, corrido scholarship, and journalistic interviews. These borrow vocal elements from corrido performance practice, quote popular cumbia songs transformed into bizarre electroacoustic intermezzi, or bring to the stage Jorge Hernández, the lead vocalist of Los Tigres del Norte.
The poly-stylistic character of ¡Únicamente la verdad! as well as its references to popular culture, its combination of traditional orchestration with the kind of audiovisual display one is more likely to experience at a rave party than at theaters like the Metropolitan Opera, and its nonchalant defiance of many conventions of opera as a genre could easily give way to a description of it as a typical postmodern musical expression. Gabriela Ortiz would probably be happy with that label and may have been just thinking about it when she accepted Carmen Tellez’s suggestion to include a direct quotation from “Contrabando y traición” (the only quotation of the song in the entire opera) in the closing scene of the opera. There, Camelia, hidden from the audience behind a silk screen set in the middle of the stage, sings three stanzas from the song. Here, the melody arises from the delicate and static atonal harmonic context provided by the orchestra, as if poetically highlighting the myth that in the liminal space between life, song, and stage, “del dinero y de Camelia nunca más se supo nada” (nobody knew what happened to Camelia or the money). And we never hear back from her or the money because, as is well known, the story in “Contrabando y traición” is a fictitious one. Although there was never a real person called Camelia la Texana, in the post-NAFTA Mexican popular imagination the character became alive and acquired a larger-than-life personality.
Notwithstanding the advertisement’s claim that Gabriela Ortiz’s opera was the authentic story of Camelia la Texana, it does not really tell a story. ¡Únicamente la verdad! is a complex exploration of the creation of the myth of Camelia after Emilio’s death—which is the last thing we know for sure about Camelia’s story from the song—that shows how media fabricates truth. It is no surprise that critic James Baker asked whether ¡Únicamente la verdad!, with its weaving together of facts and myth along with the exploration of the violent everyday reality of migration and drug trafficking at the U.S.-Mexico border, was an opera or a documentary.
Photo by Kier In Sight (Credit: Unsplash).
Death, explicit and symbolic, is as central to the development of the stories told in “Contrabando y traición” and ¡Únicamente la verdad! as it is to the history of the opera and the contemporary social trajectory of this genre. It is this type of deadness and the spaces for productive intermundane intersections (productive co-laboring relations between the dead and the living, as Benjamin Piekut and Jason Stanyek define the term) which Ortiz’s opera showcases with strokes of genius. Historically, opera as a musical and social genre is characterized by a type of exclusion and reification that is especially evident in the exoticization of the female body.
One could argue that representations of the dead female body in traditional opera—and I know I am using this term very loosely—exemplify and help perpetuate the complex interplay between pathology and power in Western culture. These kinds of depictions involve the two forms of violence against women described by literary critic Elisabeth Bronfen in her book Over Her Dead Body: first, a violence over the possession of the female body that creates conflict and drives dramatic action; and second, the sacrifice of the female body as an act of violence that seeks to bring back stability. The continuous re-imagination of the female body’s erotic power, its character as the preeminent Other, and its source of eternal longing for the male gaze signal a challenge to the balance of a desire-free world free. Thus, only death can bring balance back to that patriarchal world. Death liberates the subject from the aggression and self-destructiveness that results from disturbing the patriarchal order, but it is only female death which brings a release from desire.
Composer Gabriela Ortiz. Credit: Photo by Mara Arteaga. Used with permission from Gabriela Ortiz.
However, Gabriela Ortiz’s ¡Únicamente la verdad! estranges the metaphoric character of death in opera. Camelia’s fame is, in a way, a post-mortem phenomenon, one built upon the death of her lover. But instead of dwelling on the many possible overtones of Camelia as a vengeful killer, Ortiz’s opera bypasses that aspect of her character. In fact, the only death that takes place in the opera is that of Eleazar Pacheco; it is Pacheco’s dead body which triggers the exploration of Camelia’s myth by the composer and the librettist. Thus, desire is transferred from the female body to mythology; and from a specific locus to a transhistorical process.
Diana Taylor argues that the dynamics of signification in myth-like scenarios like Camelia’s offer the possibility of rendering something visible while continuing to reproduce the dynamics that conceal more structural problems. For Taylor, mythology is a discursive moment that renders something visible in order to resignify and appropriate it as part of a new field of cultural meaning. Her warning about the double performative edge of mythology is important to understand Gabriela Ortiz’s invocation of Camelia in a new light and with that, her articulation of the opera as a cultural field. If traditional opera renders the female body visible, it does so in order to materialize male desire and thus render the female subject invisible. Against that formula, Ortiz’s opera renders visible the process-like character of subject formation instead of objectifying the female body.
In fact, Ortiz de-emphasizes Camelia’s corporeality not only by neglecting to focus on her actions as a “living” being as represented in the corrido, focusing instead on her myth and how Mexican audiences have made it transhistorically meaningful. It also does so by bringing Camelia’s ghost, her specter, onstage at the end of the opera. Ortiz’s strategy renders the process of mythology visible and works against the objectification and exoticization of female body. Her strategy is a very effective way to estrange operatic conventions.
I propose that Ortiz’s re-articulation of operatic conventions in ¡Únicamente la verdad! engages a number of intermundane relations; that is, arrangements of mutually effective co-laboring between the dead and the living. Some of these relations belong in the realm of fiction, within the theatrical and dramatic world of the opera and the corrido. For example, the resignification of Camelia’s character in Ortiz’s opera actually forces the listener to reassess the character’s exoticist overtones in the earlier corrido. Thus, one cannot longer listen to Los Tigres del Norte’s song in the same way after experiencing the opera.
However, the intermundane relation I am more interested in exposing here is the one between opera as a genre residing in a mortuary, as opera scholars Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker have described it, and ¡Únicamente la verdad! as a video opera that provides a space for the estrangement of the former, offering a path for the renewal of its aesthetic power. As critic James Baker suggested, Ortiz’s opera stands in between opera and documentary. It does not attempt to tell us a story; instead, it seeks to shows us the world of physical and symbolic violence that the current Drug War has generated and the gender wars and violence against women it has exacerbated at the U.S.-Mexico border.
English-language project pitch.
By exploring the historical processes that made Camelia a larger-than-life myth, the composer created a musical maze that articulates the harsh reality of undocumented workers, the violent lifestyles of drug lords, the turmoil at the intersection of crime, and contemporary Mexican politics. (The reason why Ortiz chose to sample the popular quebradita song “La culebra” [The Snake] in the opera’s second electroacoustic interlude was because it was the music playing on the public loudspeakers when presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was murdered at a political rally [Content warning: violence] in the city of Tijuana, at Mexico’s northern border, in 1994.) Critical uses of artistic practices, such as Ortiz’s approach to opera in ¡Únicamente la verdad!, allow for the reconstitution of these very practices, making them relevant and meaningful in the present. Just like the history of opera shaped how Gabriela Ortiz approached the composition of ¡Únicamente la verdad!, this opera offers a way to reassess the contemporary relevance of a genre that has died many deaths but somehow refuses to breathe its last sigh.
