Porfirian Theatre and Don Juan Tenorio

The most modern of themes ―repetition, bourgeois boredom and the constant need for novelty― are fundamental to José Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio. After the play’s protagonist establishes a roguish wager with Don Luis Mejía to see who can successfully seduce more women in Act II, Scene VIII, of the 1844 play, Don Juan, now alone on stage, keenly spots the “shape of a woman” from afar: “¿Otra aventura? Me alegro” (^{1994: 1223-1224}), he soliloquises, as the promise of another victim ―fresh erotic exploits― rouses him into action. Well over a hundred years after the play’s debut in Madrid, Don Juan Tenorio is associated more than ever with recurrence, ennui, and the constant attempt to evince originality.

Case in point are the countless number of parodies that Zorrilla’s play has inspired ―plays that employ the basic elements of the original Don Juan yet modify its setting, themes, and characters in accordance with specific social and historical contexts. David T. Gies (¹⁹⁹⁴), Sook-Hwa Noh (¹⁹⁹⁹), and Carlos Serrano (¹⁹⁹⁵ y ¹⁹⁹⁶) provide the most complete studies of Don Juan’s many parodies although, at the same time, each of these authors correctly notes the necessarily limited scope of their respective articles.¹ Even the simplest search via Worldcat provides Don Juan parodies from all corners of the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. Serrano’s study, in particular, makes two important points that bear repeating before discussing Don Juan parodies further. First is the notion that donjuanesque parodies typically constitute an inversion of values.² Second is the idea that parodies of Don Juan are, at least in part, inspired by the work’s immense popularity.³ This latter idea, in turn, dovetails nicely with James Mandrell’s ambitious tome Don Juan and the Point of Honor, which proposes that Don Juan always already occupied a metadiscursive mode; the play constitutes a kind of discourse on discourse or, as Mandrell summarises: “elements in Don Juan’s story […] anticipate or call for rewriting and revision” (^{1992: 3}). Central to Don Juan ―and, even more so, the play’s parodies― is the constant provocation to continue conversation: both Zorrilla’s play and its eponymous protagonist are given to self-invention and endless adaptations in order to slough off bourgeois ennui and beat back the specter of theatrical caducity.

In Mexico, Don Juan and its parodies were produced and received differently. Although it is true that Don Juan was staged annually on November 1 and 2 throughout the Spanish-speaking world, Mexico’s relationship to the play was unique ―and not solely on account of the country’s special connection to Day of the Dead celebrations. Rather, the playwright himself, José Zorrilla, had spent over a decade (1855-1866) in Mexico within the Emperor Maxillian’s court. Zorrilla’s sojourn in Mexico was a source of pride for the country and tellingly, Mexicans were first introduced to the most novel form of media (namely, film) alongside the most familiar of stories― Don Juan.⁴ As Robert Buffington has cogently averred, Porfirian Mexico (1876-1911) was especially given to talk of Don Juan (^{2015: 176}). Via an examination of comical newspaper vignettes and “street-talk” columns about Zorrilla’s rogue womanizing protagonist, Buffington claims that working classes launched “sly jibes at Don Juan’s manhood” (²¹²), and thus interrogated traditional notions of masculinity. The penny press interrogated Don Juan’s “arrogance, impetuosity, misogyny, cruelty and callous disregard for the well-being of others (male or female)” (²⁶). Zorrilla’s protagonist was the perfect foil against which working-class men constructed new, more compassionate selves.

Robert McKee Irwin, in turn, has notably proven that conceptions of gender and sexuality were in flux during the Porfirato: Don Juan inevitably appeared as a readymade figure with which to express both the limits and promises of new sexual mores and identities.⁵ And although the belief that the Mexican Revolution of 1910 served as the ultimate fulcrum for liberating women is more romantic than real, gender roles were also modified following the Porfiriato and during revolutionary times.⁶ The year 1914 saw the passage of Mexico’s Divorce Laws that established the dissolubility of marriage (^{Monsiváis 2006: 10}).

This article especially serves as an addendum to Buffington’s project, expands upon his findings regarding the representation of Don Juan in Mexico, and deepens our understanding of how Zorrilla’s work was inflected by Mexico’s historical trajectory and gender politics during the late nineteenth ―and early twentieth― century. Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio is the perfect play by which to gauge how power structures and the population had transformed in Mexico.

By examining newspaper articles from that era that deal with Don Juan, I will make two primary claims. First, I show that in Mexico ―and in keeping with Serrano’s claims― parodies of Zorrilla’s play are necessarily destined to be ironic gibes not only leveled at the play itself but also, at its seemingly endless success. Second, I illustrate how journalistic debates surrounding Don Juan productions in Mexico registered the transformations that the theater-going public underwent during the late nineteenth ―and early twentieth― century. Don Juan’s ubiquity and long-standing success allowed it to be a litmus test by which cultural critics understand these changes. The last section of the essay explores two Don Juan parodies produced in Revolutionary Mexico, El Tenorio maderista (1912) and Tenorio Sam (1914), each of which recast Don Juan as a victor from afar: respectively, Mexican Revolutionary Francisco I. Madero and Uncle Sam, personification of the United States. In both versions of Zorrilla’s play, Inés assumes a working-class character; furthermore, she is represented as capable of rejecting or validating Don Juan’s amorous advances. In this way, I underscore the contradictory representation of women ―or what Marian Meyers (¹⁹⁹⁹) would refer to as fractured representations― within Mexican fin-de-siècle theater.⁷ These re-workings of Don Juan evidence the extreme democratic makeover that theater underwent in the late nineteenth ―and early twentieth― century Mexico. Rather than exemplifying a type of carnivalesque parody which radically inverts everything,⁸ I propose that the representation of Inés in El Tenorio maderista and Tenorio Sam bears be read as symptomatic of their time.

As mentioned above, the theater-going public in Mexico changed drastically over the course of the nineteenth century and, most dramatically, during the Porfiriato and into Revolutionary times. Susan Bryan (¹⁹⁸³) describes how the Porfiriato witnessed an expansion in terms of theater-goers and a diversification of theatrical experiences. Díaz’s Mexico saw the proliferation of tandas shows, also known as the género chico ―short, humorous, and raunchy plays that charged lower prices than traditional theaters. The spectacles attracted a less bourgeois and more diverse public. The fast-paced shows were staged late into the night, with each successive show becoming increasingly salacious: the can-can kicks reached higher, the vedettes showed more skin, and the jokes became cruder. The audience inside tandas theaters was a mélange of proletariats, parvenus, curious cultural slummers and prostitutes. While working-class, theater-going novices attended performances so as to garner a certain social and cultural cachet, more affluent patrons probably understood their attendance as a touristic visit to Mexico City’s urban demimonde. In the tandas, popular and elite culture experienced a carnivalesque erosion.

Not all Mexicans welcomed such cultural mix-ups. Tandas theaters were scrutinised by authorities both due to the behavior therein as well as their questionable hygienic and infrastructural conditions (^{Bryan 1983}, ^{Baca Barajas s.f.}). For Mexico’s prominent classes, the tandas theaters constituted a “monstruo maldito” (^{Estrada y Cordero 1896: 2}). A newspaper article suggestively dated November 4 ―but a few days after Day of the Dead celebrations which included performances of Don Juan for the umpteenth time― faults tandas for degrading Mexican theater. Printed in the semi-official publication of the Díaz administration, El Imparcial, the article notes:

Varias veces hemos hablado de los males que podría reportar el exceso de espectáculos teatrales de un gusto dudoso. Censuramos especialmente el “género chico”, aceptado por el público con una bien notada preferencia, e hicimos ver que con el tal género se aceleraba la decadencia del teatro en México (^{“El origen del mal” 1894: 2}).

With the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910, playwrights tapped into the género chico audiences, but modified play themes in order to capture the zeitgeist of a changed political environment: the working-class was finally celebrated on stage (^{Luzuriaga 1992}).

During what many saw as Mexican theater’s long decline, intellectuals turned to Don Juan to register societal changes. As Don Juan came to be understood as part of popular ―and then mass culture― rather than as part of elite culture, journalists continuously and nostalgically lamented what they perceived to be Don Juan’s loss of specialness; the supposed sterilization of what had been Don Juan’s exuberantly lascivious joie de vivre. They bewailed changed audiences and the gimmicky banalization of productions. Thus, reporting just days after the annual Don Juan performances occasioned by Day of the Dead celebrations, Mexico City newspaper El Tiempo reports: “Los teatros se llenaron de bote en bote, no se podía poner un pie en ninguna de las localidades, durante la representación. Señoras mayores de edad, hombres maduros, jóvenes y señoritas, niños y niñas, amos y criados, empleados y obreros, clase media y clase inferior, socialmente hablando, etc.” (^{“Untitled”, 1910: 5}).

For such ragtag publics, all types of Tenorio performances were elaborated. 1893 saw the creation of a Don Juan performed exclusively by child actors,⁹ while thoroughout the Porfiriato, female actresses represented Zorrilla’s protagonist ―Don Juan himself― in rather gender-bending Tenorio performances.¹⁰ Against the tedium of yearly Tenorio productions and the expanded number of citizens who finally had access to the work, production companies and the press were pushed to underscore the novelty (either real or feigned) of Don Juan productions. Boredom ―or what Elizabeth Goodstein cogently characterises as the “democratization of skepticism” (^{2005: 10})― had been associated with Don Juan since at least Lord Byron’s 1824 version of the legend. As is typical for a popular play that became increasingly massified, advertisements for the play evinced more hyperbolic language.¹¹ Acting troops choose to innovate Zorrilla’s drama in ambitious ways, yet not all of them ―like adding cancan dancers to Don Juan’s cemetery scene― were regarded as appropriate by critics.¹² In this way, and as Stuart Hall asserts regarding popular culture, Don Juan, too, was very much “an arena of consent and resistance” (^{2012: 224}).

Many were perturbed by Don Juan productions garnering an increasingly wider swath of the population;¹³ many lamented what they perceived as the play’s loss of luster over the years,¹⁴ and in particular, forward the idea that Don Juan’s rascally roguishness had been rendered sterile and insipid.¹⁵ Various columnists imagine actors impelled to stage any Tenorio, no matter how good or bad the production.¹⁶ A 1912 article crafts a humorous but crass tale about how a small town’s next Don Juan is plucked from a group of nobodies, an English teacher who teaches by way of hand gestures (^{“Los apuros de Don Juan…” 1912}). Similarly graceless is an article that joking takes the ubiquity and inspidness of Don Juan productions to a logical and bathetic conclusion via an Orientalizing chronicle about a fictitious town in the far southern reaches of Mexico called “Truchimán de los Alacranes”. Here, residents decide to stage Don Juan but ridiculously fail to keep separate their lives from the characters they play. Rather than Doña Inés being carried away by Don Juan, she carries Ciutti ―played by the town’s infirm priest― off stage (^{“Amor al Arte…” 1903}). A more democratic Tenorio had an effect not unlike Georg Simmel’s description of developments in the Swiss railway system that allowed for easier access to the Alps, and which he describes in “The Alpine Journey” (1997). That is, Don Juan’s democratic makeover “depressed those disposed to the higher and finer values without elevating those at the base to the same degree” (²¹⁹).

Two Exemplary Plays

These combined social and artistic phenomena provide the context with which to best understand two versions of Don Juan Tenorio from Revolutionary Mexico: El Tenorio maderista and Tenorio Sam. In both versions, the eponymous protagonist is represented as a transcendent figure from faraway. This type of social distance from Don Juan reiterates how a more working-class audience perceived their relationship to Zorrilla’s play itself ―as a foreign invader. Zorrilla’s Inés, in turn, is represented in these plays as the personification of the Mexican nation-state and thus, the largely working-class public that saw these plays was tasked to identify with Zorrilla’s female protagonist. The two versions of Don Juan ultimately attempt to inspire a sense of nationhood, reaffirm traditionally gender constructions, even while pointing to a new subject position for women. The parodies are thus symptomatic responses to Mexico’s extreme democratic (but not to say “liberating” or “egalitarian”) makeover.

First, we should consider El Tenorio Maderista, written by Luis Andrade and Leandro Blanco, which debuted in Mexico City’s Teatro Lírico in August 1911 ―roughly two months after Francisco I. Madero’s triumphant arrival to Mexico City. It remained in El Lírico as late as January 1912.¹⁷ Although the Lírico was inaugurated by no less the President Porfirio Díaz himself, the space was soon thereafter critiqued widely for its shoddy construction (^{Alonso 1987}). No matter the conditions of the theater, the play was an immediate success and was even staged in the United States (^{Reyes de la Maza 2005: 25}). Furthermore, in keeping with the true spirit of both the message and meaning of Don Juan, an alternative version of the play was created and served as a rejoinder: in the parody’s parody, instead of lauding Mexico’s new president ―as El Tenorio Maderista does― it warned those ready to accept Madero as President (^{Pilcher 2001: 15-16}).

El Tenorio Maderista’s protagonist is Francisco Valero (a stand-in for Francisco Madero), who plays the part of Don Juan; in turn, Bernardo Fuelles ―a stand-in for Bernardo Reyes― assumes the part of Don Luis Mejía. Finally, Porfirio Noches (Porfirio Díaz) is the Don Gonzálo character. As already intimated above, the play’s last scene sees Valero (Madero) win the day when he is “saved” by “El Pueblo” ―the play’s damsel in distress and Inés’s homologue―. The play ends with “Tenorio” Madero having literally buried his opposition: stage directions call for cemetery tombs to be labeled “opresión y tiranía,” “caciquismo y gobernantes perpetuos”, and “científicos” (^{Andrade y Blando 1912: 28}).

Cheeky changes to the source material (Zorrilla’s original text) are pervasive throughout the play: annotations, for instance, call for Madero’s countryside abode “a corta distancia de la vía del ferrocarril” (²³) ―rather than, like Don Juan’s home― alongside Seville’s Guadalquivir River. The play casts Inés as both a personification of the Mexican nation-state and, furthermore, impoverished. In this way, Buffington is indeed correct in signaling how, in light of the Revolution of 1910, Mexican popular culture experienced a “radical reversal of established hierarchies ―a reversal in which nosotroslos pelados (we the pelados) would be nosotros el pueblo (we the people)” (^{2015: 25}). To wit, while Zorrilla’s original calls for Inés to faint “trastornada”, in El Tenorio Maderista, Inés’s dizzy spell is brought on by her poverty-induced malnutrition: “si estaba muy maltrada / por alimentarse mal” (^{Andrade y Blanco: 22}). Adding to Buffington’s thesis reguarding Mexico’s transition from pelado to pueblo ―and as evidenced by El Tenorio Maderista― was also deeply gendered. Even if idealised as a type of lady liberty, in these Don Juan parodies, Inés is thrust to the fore. The play evinces this unique and contradictory subject position that women occupied even at the level of language. Just as Zorrilla’s Inés is amorously moved upon receiving Don Juan’s letter, “El Pueblo” ―or rather, Inés― in El Tenorio Maderista is politicised when she receives Madero’s missive. She soliloquises:

Que caiga la tiranía y me den Constitución! Que termine el caciquismo! Que se me empiece a ilustrar (²¹).

Tellingly, Inés ―again, referred to by the playwrights as “El Pueblo”― describes her political education not in specifically agentive terms but rather, using the reflexive pronoun “se” ―it is an unplanned, even unreflective occurrence. To the extent that “El Pueblo” feels enlightened, it is an enlightenment that comes from above, which happens to her. This, I suggest, reveals the discursive fetters placed on working-class political subjectivity and feminity. Thus El Tenorio Maderista discloses truths about the Revolution that have been occluded during the twentieth century due to Mexico’s promotion of revolutionary culture. The Mexican Revolution may not have been so much a story of self-actualization from below but rather, an unforeseen schism that began as an elite quarrel from above.¹⁸

Tenorio Sam is both similar to and different from El Tenorio Maderista. As Mandrell explains, contradictory conceptions of the Don Juan figure were present throughout the nineteenth century;¹⁹ thus, while El Tenorio Maderista celebrates the Tenorio character as Francisco I. Madero, Tenorio Sam defames the Tenorio character ―personified by Uncle Sam― as a conniving bully. Both plays recast Don Juan as novel victors from afar. In Tenorio Sam, Uncle Sam, incarnate of US identity and values, is the Tenorio character, while Don Luis Mejía is represented by the national personification of England, John Bull. “Una Indita” ―Inés’s stand-in― represents the mestizo nation-state of Mexico. The play debuts on February 28, 1914 in El Principal, known as the most notorious venue for tandas productions, the theater which catered to society’s roughest characters.

Tenorio Sam is, in many ways (and in Buffington’s terms) even more explicit in regards to consolidating a sense of how Mexico’s pelados became pueblos. As the Indita, Tenorio Sam’s Inés is both impecunious and indigenous ―the audience of El Principal is obviously meant to identify with her rather than with Don Juan. She is characterised as the “hija de Moctezuma” (^{1914: 12}), while her house is plebian. The stage directions tautologically underscore the abode’s poverty: “Casa pobre que se parezca en algo a la celda de Doña Inés - Cómoda con algún santo. - Mesa pobre y sillas” (⁹, italics mine). The play’s spectators should see themselves in Inés’s poverty and indigeneity, they are also meant to be empowered by her ability to spurn America’s jingoistic, interventionist fantasies. Various modifications are made to Zorrilla’s original work so as to underscore Inés’s worth, her agency, and even her power. Instead of fainting upon first meeting the Don Juan figure (here, Uncle Sam), in Tenorio Sam’s homologous scene, the Indita spurns his attempts to woo her:

me dicen todos que no te quiera que te desprecie que te las tráis que eres altivo que eres grosero que barbas tienes y chisiscráis (¹¹).

The Indita’s response to Don Juan’s letter which, as the stage directions explain, is mockingly massive in size: the Brígida character ―here doubling as John Lind, the US diplomatic emissary to Mexico― delivers to Inés a written proposal from Uncle Sam.²⁰ She “le entrega un sobre de enorme dimensiones” (¹⁰). During her conversation with John Lind ―referred to as “El Manco”― Inés the Indita is shown as very much capable of matching the invader’s oversized histrionics:

Indita: Veamos que dice, a ver. (Suspira y tiemblan las paredes). El Manco: ¿Tiemblamienta? Indita: No, suspiro porque cuanto más la miro, menos me atrevo a leer (¹¹).

This sigh turned tremor is suitable for the sarcastic character of a tanda production. But it should also be taken seriously: it is nothing short of a telluric response from el pueblo. The Indita’s seismic exhalation constitutes a type of earthy and autochtonous reaction to the United States’s imperialistic land-grab. The scene’s proud characterization of a quiver turned earthquake effectively presages the themes explored in Dr. Alt’s (Gerardo Murillo) series of volcano paintings ―Paricutín (1943), Erupción del Paricutín (1943), and El Popocatépetl desde un avión (1948): namely, the Indita’s exhale suggests the deep powers bubbling just under the surface of the Mexican landscape.

In this way, in Tenorio Sam, Inés is a damsel in distress and also agentive: in Meyer’s terminology, she is a “fractured” representation. On the cover of the play’s published script, the Indita ―again, the character whom spectators are tasked to identify with― looks directly at the viewer. Uncle Sam, alternatively, is positioned so as to see his profile; he looks sideways and uses a come-hither gesture. Furthermore, and unlike Zorrilla’s original script, the Indita gets the play’s last word while ―and as was typical in tandas plays― she vanquishes the baddie to death. “¿Muerto yo?” asks Uncle Sam, to which the Indita replies “La avaricia te mató / pues la tuviste sin tasa” (²³).

Thus in both Tenorio Sam and in El Tenorio Maderista, the audience is asked to identity with Zorrilla’s Inés character ―simultaneously a female figure and, furthermore, representative of the Mexican pueblo― in ways never previously known. As a final note, these parodies of Don Juan, offered to a working-class theater-going public, are very much at odds with more “lettered” reactions to Don Juan’s overlong life on the Mexico stage. A case in point is a 1893 article in Revista Azul by Carlos Díaz Dufóo, who writes that “D. Juan Tenorio es usted, soy yo, somos todos los que llevamos en las venas glóbulos de sangre latina” (^{1894: 26}). While “lettered” classes continue to identify with Zorrilla’s male protagonist, Don Juan, women (here, represented by Inés) are relegated to the spaces of mass culture.²¹ Even more suspect is Díaz Dufóo’s notion that “ha resistido Don Juan a la evolución literaria que se ha efectuado en estos últimos años” (²⁷). In a sense, Don Juan did remain noble ―a heartthrob from far awy. Yet, the two tandas plays I have examined here suggest that, even if Zorrilla’s Don Juan Tenorio seemed to exist removed from time, the work was consistently rendered contemporary via Mexican parodies.

Via a study of the journalistic discussion surrounding the figure of Zorrilla’s Don Juan, the history of Don Juan Tenorio parodies, and finally, two versions of Don Juan Tenorio which cast Inés as representative of an impoverished, indigenous, but proudly Mexican nation-state, I hope to have revealed the flipside phenomenon of Buffington’s ambitious thesis in his A Sentimental Education for the Working Man: The Mexico City Penny Press, 1900-1910. While Buffington examines “the complex, often contradictory history of working-class masculinities in Mexico” (²¹⁹), this article has focused on the similarly complex relationship between femininity and el pueblo as these dual themes were represented in parodies of Don Juan Tenorio. In short, as the theater-going public in Mexico was transformed, Zorrilla’s Inés character became a placeholder for traits understood as inherently Mexican: most particularly, impecuniousness and indigeneity. Ultimately, these representations of Inés illustrate both the fetters and freedoms of female subjectivity in Mexican theater of the Revolutionary era.