2022: the right prefers a mestizo Chanel, not a migrant

2022: the right prefers a mestizo Chanel, not a migrant

Nacho Cano is annoyed that for thanking Isabel Díaz Ayuso they accuse him of flirting with the right. "In the eighties there was no censorship," he told Pablo Motos in El Hormiguero to justify his closeness with the president of the Community of Madrid and with the mayor also of the PP, José Luis Martínez-Almeida. "They didn't put you on the left or the right with the fucking speech of the balls," he said during the program to try to show that he is a creator outside of ideologies. Minutes later he praised the singer, dancer and actress Chanel Terrero, bronze medalist in Eurovision, and then he did make clear his political fixation, his accomplice with the rights.

Nacho Cano knows Chanel well and until this Friday he was scheduled to play the character of Malinche in his controversial montage, about the founding of Mexico according to the Hispanic story. It was to happen from September 15. The musical's producer omitted Chanel's name from the cast, offering no explanation..

Mexican actress Andrea Boyardo will replace Chanel in the show that will no longer take place in a 25-meter Aztec pyramid with a theater inside for more than 1,000 seats, on a site in Hortaleza. It will be at Ifema and from 35 euros ("with reduced visibility") to 125 euros ("Magic Mexico VIP seat"). In the Pablo Motos program, days before the Eurovision festival, Cano explained that he had been rehearsing with Chanel for a year and three months and predicted a success: "There is no one in that contest, and I have not seen the others, that he be more prepared than Chanel".

But your work and preparation is not enough. Nacho Cano added that "it is a success that goes further". And at that moment he explained his vision of Hispanic culture, which is what gives meaning to his new musical product. "500 years ago miscegenation began and she is a mestiza who defends Spain in Eurovision," she said in a historical arc that began with the invasion of Mexico by Hernán Cortés, on August 13, 1521, and ended in Laura Pausini presenting that gala. From a bloody invasion to a song contest.

romanticize the story

After Eurovision Chanel has hardly been seen to act. He made a last-minute stellar appearance at the San Isidro festivities in May, and, above all, gave the proclamation at the LGTBIQ+ Pride festivities in July, where he declared that he would fight “every day” so that the homosexual community receives the pride he deserves. "Thanks to all the men and women I have loved, for teaching me to love without prejudice," the singer acknowledged to the applause of the public. "Because it's not about being respected whoever you love, it's about being respected whoever you are," she finished her speech.

His plea for love without conventional limits collides head-on with the romanticization of history proposed by Nacho Cano in his production. The thesis handled by the musician defends a founding myth of "love" between the indigenous woman and the Extremaduran soldier, which ensures that the Mexicans are thanks to the Spaniards. The birth of a new culture from the union of Malinche and Hernán Cortés.

Cano continued in El Hormiguero with his historical legend without abating the Spanish fever and, according to the musician himself, apolitical: "It is a success for our nation and our culture and for something as wonderful as miscegenation, which we did," he said. Nacho Cano including himself in the team of those Spaniards from five centuries ago.

"After so much battle and so much tragedy, there are always winners and losers. But in this case it was something different. There is a new race with a lot of personality," Nacho Cano releases to the performers of his musical, in the living room of his house while recording the documentary that premiered on Netflix last year. According to the musician, the encounter between the Spaniards and the Aztecs had "passion and emotion", he himself explains: "The Aztecs were very emotional. The Spaniards, too. That's why they merged into one."

The old component of Mecano has built a legend that erases the murders, the appropriations and the cultural imposition. This was already done by the Consejo de la Hispanidad during the dictatorship. Malinche is the character that Nacho Cano uses to legitimize the myth of "hispanidad".

Camba Ludlow, a historian who has just published Echoes of New Spain: Lost Centuries in the History of Mexico (Grijalbo in Mexico), indicates that this love story between the indigenous and the military "is a ridiculous legend." "Romantic love is an invention of the 19th century," she says, emphasizing that presentism makes us see that supposed love as we would see it today. "We tend to judge the past with our filter. The historian Edmundo O'Gorman said that historians were not here to scold the dead, but to explain and contextualize," says the specialist researcher on the arrival of the Spanish in America.

Historians describe Malinche as the key player in resolving the invasion and destruction of Tenochtitlán in favor of the Spanish and the allied valley towns against Moctezuma. Thanks to her, Hernán Cortés assembled the army that killed the Mexicas, enemies of the people of Malinche. The Mexican historiography of the 19th century has turned her into a traitor and the Spanish see in her a dedicated lover, ignoring the political alliance. "Malinche is the figure that explains the world to Hernán Cortés. What she told Cortés is an unfathomable mystery, but whatever he explained allowed Cortés to triumph," says Mexican historian Úrsula Camba Ludlow.

Malinche became a free woman and he became the governor of Mexico. Calling this union "love" is the story that Vox defended in 2020, the moment of collapse of the sculptures of Christopher Columbus and company in the cities of the United States and Latin America. The PP demanded in the Senate from the Government an institutional declaration in defense of the "Spanish legacy" to oppose the revision that the American countries carried out of the tributes to that past.

There is a key date in the construction of Spanish and Mexican identity: 1898 and the loss of Cuba, the last colony of the former great world empire of which nothing was left. It is at that moment when two new stories are created on both sides of the Atlantic. The historians Tomás Pérez Vejo and Alejandro Salafranca tell in The conquest of identity. Mexico and Spain, 1521-1910 (Turner), that the Spanish Crown silenced the conquest of Mexico in its war propaganda (battle rooms and State spaces) because they did not want to be remembered as the conquerors of the Indies but as instruments of their evangelization . Faced with this, "New Spain cemented her complex identity by reinterpreting and exalting the conquest."

This was the case until 1898, when the Spanish changed the story and took up the conquest as part of their national construction. And Mexico imposes the opposite vision, "that of secular victims of European abuse." "Mexico is a creation of the 19th century, with hymns, flags, like any other Nation State. Mexico has had many difficulties in being able to build itself as a nation with a discourse," adds Úrsula Camba Ludlow. The creation of the Spain brand has not been easy either, as Pérez Vejo and Salafranca recount. The nostalgia of the greatest military event in the history of Spain returns to the present whenever the homeland is left without a future.

The singer Chanel Terrero is a Cuban migrant who came with her family from Havana (Cuba) at the age of three. In 1993 they settled in Olesa de Montserrat (Barcelona), a population with a marked left-wing vote, of almost 25,000 inhabitants and with registered citizens from 73 countries. The migrant population is 10.1% of the total. In Catalonia, the three cities with the highest percentages are Barcelona (21.3%), 22.1% in Hospitalet de Llobregat and Badalona, ​​15.4%. Moroccan nationality represents almost 45% of all foreigners in Olesa. Bolivian, Chinese, Colombian, Ecuadorian, Honduran and Pakistani nationalities also stand out. In addition, both the Spanish and foreign groups, the percentage of the population with higher education is higher among women.

Miquel Riera (of the Bloc Olesà) is the mayor of the municipality and in his first speech as alderman of Olesa he clarified that the priority of his party's government would be social policies. The city council has among its declared objectives "to promote awareness, knowledge and civic commitment of citizens", of values ​​such as "solidarity, peace and human rights, "to face through humanitarian action" catastrophes of "natural origin , socio-natural and human". And "to promote and contribute to the development of the countries and peoples of the South". Riera also shouted with joy the day Chanel Terrero won third place in Eurovision. professional level thanks to their effort and perseverance", said the mayor. And also that the performance, which had been ten, confirmed "the confidence that the people of Olens had in the neighbor who they have seen grow".

Despite the imperophilia of the PP, Vox, Ciudadanos and the cultural products of Nacho Cano, Chanel Terrero is not a success of miscegenation forced by the Spanish five centuries ago, but of a migration policy plan that aspires to inclusion, coexistence and participation. And, above all, they do not see an invasion in the arrival of citizens from other countries. As can be read on the website of the Olesa de Montserrat town hall, they are proud of their diversity because "it brings cultural richness to the town and sets the goal of achieving social inclusion, coexistence and the active participation of all citizens". Despite everything, Chanel has admitted to having suffered harassment at school for being a foreigner.

Although thanks to Chanel, Nacho Cano has constructed the story of romantic love and miscegenation for the launch of his latest show, she is a citizen educated in a population that defends the reception of migrants, the understanding of what is different and the planning of aid against discrimination. Her effort to reach Eurovision and her social, political and economic context do not coincide with the nationalist story that the Spanish right-wing champions.

For Ana Díaz Serrano, historian and researcher at the Ramón y Cajal-University of Murcia, the idea of ​​miscegenation is "very dangerous." "Its use since the nineteenth-century Hispanism outlines gratitude for a mixture that improves the American (understanding the indigenous as such) by Europeanizing it. Already at the end of the 20th century it was used to balance the clash between the black legend and the pink legend, precisely in the close to the celebrations of the Fifth Centenary. The fact that it was promoted by European Hispanists gave it a halo of neutrality and, therefore, the key to open one of the doors to the historical truth of what happened when America appeared on the maps Europeans, without having to complicate ourselves with using terms such as "discovery", "encounter", "invasion" or even "colonization", indicates the historian.

The biggest trap, he adds, has been taking "miscegenation" for granted, always, everywhere, as an "unstoppable and even desirable process." The indigenous has lacked interest and has been discarded in this reconstruction of miscegenation. "Mestizaje, more than erasing the history of indigenous peoples, attaches it to a European history," explains Ana Díaz.

In fact, the historical reconstruction of Hispanic history has wanted to drink only from the writings preserved in Simancas and the Archive of the Indies, where the voices of the Spanish military are guarded. And only theirs. It has left out of the debate the dominated and unlettered peoples, who were victims of weapons, but above all of the story of history, written by the invaders who annihilated them. In contrast to conservative narratives, progressive historians have added ethnohistory, the history of minorities told from their own experience, to studies of the past. They opened the manuals to the silenced voices, who counted themselves and studied themselves during post-colonization.

When America did not need anyone to tell itself, Spain lost the hegemony of the story and once without power came the myths. The mission of historiography is to neutralize these political myths and "complete the pages of history that have been left blank", as Ana Díaz says. Nacho Cano will insist on nineteenth-century stereotypes, but he will no longer have Chanel Terrero to legitimize them.

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