They Call Me La Lupe

Hola mi Gente,

I don’t know how I missed it, but apparently Brooklyn-born actress Lauren Vélez (of Dexter and NY Undercover fame) has spearheaded a kickstarter campaign to bring to the screen the story of Latina songstress, Guadalupe Victoria Yolí Raymond, also known as La Lupe. Here’s the trailer and Ms Vélez, who resurrected La Lupe in a one-woman show a couple of years ago, called They Call Me La Lupe (the title of the film as well) at Teatro LATEA here in NYC, seems to capture her essence:

I was fortunate enough to be able to see La Lupe at the height of her career in the 1970s. A few years ago, I wrote about the impression this singular artist left on me.

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La YiYiYi/ La Lupe/ La Reina

El dia en que te deje/ fui yo quien salio ganando

(The day I left you/ it was I who came out winning.)
-- La Lupe, La Gran Tirana

One day a question from one of my readers/ friends left me thinking about boleros, this in turn, led me to reflect on who in my opinion, was one of its greatest interpreters, La Lupe.

I first saw La Lupe, aka La YiYiYi, barely into my 20s and before then, I wasn’t a big fan. I viewed boleros (love ballads) as a musical genre that older Puerto Rican people enjoyed and sang to one another. I think it was a common enough occurrence among Puerto Ricans: my parents would sometimes have arguments via songs. My father would sing some lyrics of a certain song, and then my mother would reply with lyrics from a song of her own choosing, that type of thing. Like an argument, but with song lyrics... LOL

Anyway, one of the songs my mother would sing to my father was one of her favorite boleros, La Gran Tirana, by the inimitable La Lupe. Its lyrics was something like a feminist rallying cry for women from El Barrio and sung by La Lupe, they oozed irony. The opening lines go something like so:

Segun tu punto de vista
yo soy la mala.
Vampiressa de tu novela,
La Gran Tiriana.

(According to you,
I am the bad one.
Vampiress of your soap opera,
The great tyrant.)

I still get chills whenever I hear those opening lines.

In the hands of a lesser artist, La Gran Tirana could have easily devolved into something melodramatic and trite, but as sung by the La Lupe, it’s a powerful claim to liberation, of doing away with oppression -- Yeah, you want to paint me as the bad one? Go ahead! La Lupe, for me at least, was the receptacle or emblematic of the power of the women in my own life, all of whom bravely faced violence and racism with a power and grace that would inform my own life.

I saw La Lupe perform only once, many years ago in NYC’s old cavernous Madison Square Garden. There were thousands of screaming fans, the noise level distracting, and the sound acoustics horrible. There were many acts that night in the early 70s, the main one being The Fania All Stars, a group of NYC Latino/a musicians that would eventually storm the international music world and bring that uniquely Nuyorican cultural phenomenon/ urban folklore known as salsa to the world. But that night, salsa was ours and ours alone. No one knew what the hell salsa was, and even less of La Lupe.

When La Lupe came on stage, the audience, composed mostly of young Latino/as, went into a frenzy, screaming her name and demanding dedications. To this day, I can’t say I have witnessed a more powerful performance and I have seen many, many performers. I believe it was Frank Sinatra who said that it was dangerous for a performer to give everything, that a performer must, for their own survival, save something for themselves.

Well, La Lupe, bless her soul, gave everything that night. She left nothing, not one thing, for herself. Halfway through her performance she was sitting on the edge of the stage and all of sudden, it didn’t feel like Madison Square Garden anymore, it was as if we were all transported to an intimate world created wholly by La Lupe. It seemed as if she sang as if it were the last time she would sing, throwing everything into every song, every note, every syllable. Each movement was imbued with meaning and energy as she sang, laughed, and cried. Her ability to create that level intimacy was remarkable. You could feel her life force reaching out to you, taking you in, seducing you. She would claw at her clothes, scratch herself, yell out in pain -- she gave so much. And I sat there transfixed. She called herself an empress and I'd be a damned if she really wasn’t. 

Finally, she came to that point in her performance -- she sat on the edge of the stage her clothes by now gone -- torn apart by her own hands -- scratched and bleeding, she sat there in her bra and lingerie, and she managed to look like some reincarnated Taina queen. 

You could hear a pin drop... 

And that’s when she sang the opening lines to La Tirana:

Segun tu punto de vista/ yo soy la mala…

 

And it was too much; the crowd went wild, taken over the edge by a rare and masterful artist. At that moment, I fell in love with that woman’s soul. She possessed so much spiritual power and she was so willing, even in the face of what seemed like certain annihilation, to share it. I actually feared for her, screamed for her, I -- everyone that night -- felt her pain, her joy, her bliss, and we all heard that cry for freedom. I saw people cry and cheer. Her performance was so powerful that I sit here, more than 40 years later writing about what was a powerful epiphany.

Unfortunately, I never got to see her again and, due in part to poor management and bad career choices, she would fall into relative obscurity. The great Spanish director’s, Pedro Almodóvar, use of La Lupe’s song Puro Teatro, in his 1988 film, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, rekindled interest in her music. And Ms Velez’ efforts produced an Off-Broadway play and in that way, her music was revived for a new generation.

Sadly, La Lupe would become destitute after her recording contract was not renewed. She would pick up the pieces, would become a Christian minister, and living as an unknown in a South Bronx tenement she passed on. When news of her death became known, tens of thousands grieved. Money was collected for her funeral and musicians and other artists came together to pay tribute to the true Queen of Salsa. 

She was one of those souls that flared brightly if too briefly and gave all she could, throwing caution to the wind. To me, she was woman incarnate that night on that stage. I would never forget her.

A bolero is a ballad, my friends, and with that, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, La Lupe:

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My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization… 

Resources

La Lupe would become a a gay icon of sorts and you can many clips of her performances on YouTube.

As I understood it, the film was supposed to be released in 2013, but considering this is an independent feature, I am not sure of the film's current status.


You can find an interview of Lauren Velez in which she goes into depth about La Lupe and her motivation to bring her to the screen here

The film's Facebook page here

The film's kickstarter page here
 

The Plantation in Puerto Rican Popular Music

I wrote the following for another site and I don’t believe it migrated here. I’m in a Puerto Rican Studies mood today, so I’m sharing.

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Plantacíon Adentro: The Plantation in Puerto Rican Popular Music

Sombras son la gente…

The connection between the Cuban “Son” and Salsa is undeniable, but whereas son is Cuban country music, salsa was the child of an inner city identity movement wrought by the mass migration of primarily Puerto Rican Latin@s to New York in the 50s and 60s. Hence Salsa, right off the bat, is overtly political. The Panamanian-born actor, songwriter, poet, Harvard-trained lawyer, and politician, Ruben Blades (who sings lead here) once asserted that salsa was more than a musical genre, it was a way of life, an “urban folklore.” Eventually that urban folklore -- that cry of the urban Latin@ working class -- would reach 100s of millions of Latin@s in Barrios the world over. Eventually Europe and swaths of the Orient would come under its rhythmic spell (salsa dancing and salsa bands still very popular in Japan -- Google Orquesta la Luz).

While some salsa songs, for example, take up the theme of the sweetness of the sugarcane as a way to explore nostalgia for the good things of the old country, others explored the politics more trenchantly. What ultimately appealed to the young Puerto Ricans in New York and Latin@s the world over were the songs that documented (and in that way validated), celebrated, and explored life in El Barrio.

As an example, Willie Colon and Ruben Blades collaborated on a viciously wicked song called “Plantación Adentro” (literally Plantation Inside). Though it deals with a coffee rather than a sugar plantation, the system of oppression is not much different. Written by one of the greatest Puerto Rican composers, Tite Curet Alonso, the song is notable first for its black humor, which is used as a vehicle to expose the hypocrisy and cruelty of the entire system:

Se murio el indio Camilo por palo que daba el mayoral

que medico de turno dijo asi, “muerte por causa natural.”

¡claro! si despues de una tunda de palos, que se muera es normal

English translation:

Camilo the Indian died from the beating the overseer gave him,

and the doctor on shift pronounced it,

“death by natural causes.”

Sure! after a rain of blows naturally one dies!

Not much different from the reality that many Puerto Ricans and other minorities experience: so long as everything is certified by a specialist (in this case the doctor on call) the status quo holds and the system is legitimized by its social institutions and proceeds business-as-usual. Of course, the meaning of that “natural” death is open to interpretation, and while it results from a natural or normal chain of cause and effect, it is not legally a “natural” death. This highlights the essentially violent nature of capitalism, as experienced in the postcolonial context.

The song also utilizes a theme that centers on the paradox between secrecy (a proactive blindness?) and revelation. This is an inspired bit of writing on the part of Alonso: the plantation presents us with a conundrum, as it is at the same time hidden (“adentro”) and out in the open. Its marginal status virtually ensures that few people outside the industry would or could penetrate the boundaries erected by social prejudice, geographical isolation, and poverty.

The song begins with the news broadcast of a death and then proceeds with the following lyrics:

Sombras son la gente, sombras son la gente

Plantación adentro camará, e' donde se sabe la verdad,

e' donde se aprende la verdad,

dentro del follaje, y de la espesura, donde todo viaje, lleva la amargura . . .

Camilo Manrique fallecio por golpes que daba el mayoral

y fue sepultado sin llorar, una cruz de palo y nada más.

English:

People are but mere shadows... there's a plantation inside there,

that's where the truth is known, that's where the truth is learned,

inside the foliage, past the thickets, where everyone passes, there is bitter grief...

Camilo Manrique died from the blows of the overseer

and was buried without tears, a cross made from sticks and nothing more.

While the song is a lament for the cruel murder of an Indian, its genius consists in the way it builds its meaning around symbols of boundaries that simultaneously define and blur the spaces they delineate. The foliage marks the borders of the plantation, inside of which “the truth is learned.” 

Paradoxically, the thickets serve to hide this inside knowledge from those who pass by without entering. The grave marker is merely two sticks that reinforce the anonymity of the death. It marks the grave but not the body interred within it. Nothing more can be known about the deceased or the circumstances of his death. The fact that the sticks are of the very same material that killed the Indian is an irony that would escape notice were it not for the narrator's constant repetition of the word “palo” used here both in the sense of “stick” and the “blow” dealt by a stick (“palo” is both a noun: stick; and an action: a blow).

In fact, the entire incident, along with the presence and significance of the plantation, would escape notice, were it not for the narrator's own transgression, which means that the plantation now bears scrutiny and exists as a kind of “clue” or crime scene that must be investigated, penetrated, brought to light. It is an open secret, the dirty laundry of the captains of industry.

Tite Curet Alonso was arguably the greatest composer and interpreter of Afro-Puerto Rican musical and written art forms. He composed songs based on folkloric expressions of the very poor and downtrodden and wrote in a way that entertained, instructed, and elevated urban popular culture no other composer can claim. That his genius is barely acknowledged today is itself a crime.

My name is Eddie and I’m in recovery from civilization…