This past Wednesday February 14 I attended the opening of Carmen Aguirre’s Broken Tailbone at the Historic Theatre of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.

This 80 minute performance featuring Carmen Aguirre as La Jefa and Pedro Chamale as the the DJ El Jefecito was directed by Brian Quirt.

If you were not a 75-year-old failed Argentine Tango dancer and arthritic grandfather (me), you would have emerged as a pretty competent salsa, cumbia, candombe, bugaloo, merengue (and more) dancer of that diverse music called música tropical in my Latin America.

The dance lessons came with a message. While Aguirre and Chamale may have been smiling the message was a serious one.

If you did not understand any Spanish you might have missed the several moments when Aguirre painfully paid homage to her Uncle Nelson, a man of strict political ethics who squandered (perhaps?) a life with alcohol and cigarettes.

While younger than this man, Aguirre is a product of the last century, a century that was less politically correct. For anybody present on Wednesday you would instantly know that Aguirre likes her men unabashedly and honestly. In fact some of the Spanish swearing (lots of it of  the Argentine variety) made me blush and to find out how it was that she broke her tailbone (this happens at the end of the show) was as off-colour as the night could get!

Beneath this beautiful, curvy woman with big black eyes there is a lot more.  She is what we in Latin America call a “militante”. This is a person who has sound beliefs (beliefs of which Aguirre was willing to forgo her own safety and life many times) on what they consider to be the only valid social structure. This social structure is a leftist leaning one. In Latin America there has been a long list of right-wing dictators and military dictatorships that killed and disappeared many. And of course, Aguirre reminded us of lots of instances in which entities like the United Fruit Company and shadow versions of the CIA meddled in bringing down governments or training the Bolivian troops that placed Che Guevara on that infamous slab in the mountain town of Vallegrande.

While Aguirre and family might have escaped the clutches of the Pinochet regime in Chile to find refuge in Canada, the fact is that Aguirre and her mother went back to Chile (and Argentina and Bolivia) to practice what was pleasantly preached in song and dance this last Wednesday.

With Isabel Allende

In 2013 I was one of the judges for the BC Non-Fiction prize. I was sent 100 books which I was supposed to read in under two months. One of them was Aguirre’s Something Fierce - Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter.

I left reading it to the bitter end suspecting the account would be an angry and depressing one. I was completely wrong! The story was full of humour and some of the passages (we know Aguirre likes men) made me blush.

At perhaps a half a century of existence Aguirre may have reached a period of her militancy where she might be pondering on a poem of Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi from her works State of Exile:

Courage

I said to you:

“One needs a lot of courage

for so much useless death.”

You thought I was referring to Latin America.

No, I was talking

About dying in bed,

In a great city,

At eighty  or ninety years old.

In Julio Cortázar’s story Reunión in which the narrator is Che Guevara, after a bloody landing in a Cuban island, Che under a tree and friend Luís recall:

I stayed with Luís leaning on the trunk of a tree, smoking and looking at the drawings of the leaves against the sky and we told each other of all that had happened to us since our landing, but above all we talked about the future, of what was going to begin on the day when we would have to transfer from the rifle to the office with telephones, from the sierra to the city…

My translation

I am sure that the ever fruitful Aguirre will find a solution to all that. And she will thoroughly entertain us while at it.

One of my memories of Carmen Aguirre is indelible. In February of 1999 at the Stanley Theatre, Carmen Aguirre played Frida Kahlo in Susan Astley and Steve Petch's Tribute to Frida Kahlo. Aguirre was Kahlo. Another memory is Aguirre's modification of a Julio Cortázar story "Las Reglas del Juego" into a play that I saw at Studio 58 (her alma matter).

Homage to Tío Nelson