José Limón and La Malinche

Few books focus on renowned dancer, choreographer, and teacher José Acadio Limón (1908 – 72), despite his lifetime achievements in modern dance. In José Limón and La Malinche, artists as well as scholars from fields as diverse as history, anthropology, Spanish and Mexican American studies, and dance studies come together to explore Limón and one of his most famous works, La Malinche. This dance, composed in the late 1940s, features one of the legendary personages from the period of the Spanish invasion, Malintzin, or, as she was later renamed by the Spaniards, Doña Marina. Malintzin, born in a Nahuatl-speaking indigenous community on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, was given to a Mayan group as a girl. She was later given to Hernan Cortés, becoming his translator, mistress, and mother to his mestizo son. Over the past five centuries, the iconic la Malinche has been portrayed as a traitor, a victim, the mother of a new race, and an intelligent woman doing the best she could in terrible circumstances. Regardless of which image one leans toward, she was clearly a mediator between two cultures. Like Limón, she made cultures understandable to each other and thus serves as a perfect backdrop for understanding the award-winning dancer.The choice of La Malinche allows the contributors to examine what one scholar calls “cross border historical memory.” Like the informants in this essay, Limón’s worldview was “rooted in two languages, two nations, two economies, in short two cultures” (p. 114). Jose Limón was born in 1908 in Culiacan, Sinaloa, Mexico. During the Mexican Revolution of 1910, his family was forced to flee their homeland, moving to Los Angeles when Limón was an adolescent. Coming from a middle-class family in Mexico, where his father was the director of a state orchestra, to the United States, where the family experienced financial insecurity in the midst of widespread anti-Mexican sentiment, surely influenced Limón later in life. Like others of his generation, Limón incorporated both a Mexican and a Mexican American sensibility into his life and consequently into his dance compositions, turning to Mexican themes in dances such as La Piñata, Danzas Mexicanas, and the focus of this book, La Malinche. Yet he rarely spoke of his Mexicanness, making the question posed by volume editor Patricia Seed more intriguing. Asking how “Mexico figured in Limon’s artistic imagination,” Seed concludes that it is in dance that “Limón’s Mexican heritage remains most strongly embedded” (p. 4). The essays that comprise the volume seek (some more successfully than others) to answer the question from a variety of angles and provide some intriguing insights into the artistic creativity of Limón.The essays cover a wide range of topics, evaluating “the set, costumes, music, unpublished choreographic notes, and historical content” of La Malinche. For example, while one essay examines Limon’s development of the characters (La Malinche, El Indio, and El Conquistador), another explores the role of women in Nahua society. Essays point to the influence on Limon’s work of famous Mexican muralists such as Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco (whose work, ironically, Limón experienced in the United States rather than Mexico) as well as the Mexican codices that tell the story of the conquest. The reader learns of Limon’s talent for choreography as well as his influence on Mexican modern dance. An accompanying DVD even allows us to view a performance of La Malinche, featuring Limón.The broad scope of this edited volume with its complex reading of the historic Malintzin, la Malinche of popular culture, and the dance composition bearing her name is often captivating. Yet, crossing national boundaries between the United States and Mexico while moving through time from the colonial period to the present, the collection of essays sometimes moves a bit haltingly. Despite this, however, the book provides a fascinating look into the ways in which historical remembrance, dance, and history come together in the work of one of the most influential choreographers of the twentieth century. Specialists in a number of areas, as well as general readers, will find something of interest in this collection of essays. José Limón and La Malinche adds significantly to our understanding of this influential choreographer, his work, and the cultural forces that created both the dance and the dancer

Art · Art history · Dance · Girl · Humanities · Indigenous · Literature · Nahuatl · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Psychology