Norge Espinosa Mendoza’s La Virgencita de Bronce: From Cecilia Valdés to the Puppet Unstrung

• In Event: Roots and Offshoots: New Approaches to Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés

Abstract

In 1882, Cirilo Villaverde’s contemporaries and critics praised the author’s exemplary costumbrista novel Cecilia Valdés for its realistic representation of freed black, Congo, and Bozal character types. Villaverde’s masterpiece was published in exile, where illustrated compendiums of such character types circulated among the literary elite. The black Cuban statesmen Martin Morúa Delgado rewrote Cecilia Valdés as Sofia (1891), which exposed creole writers’ quest to inscribe and control darker character types within their proto-national vision of an independent Cuba. In 2004, Cuban poet and director of scenic arts Norge Espinosa Mendoza revamped Villaverde’s novel, keeping in mind a contemporary audience as well as Reinaldo Arenas’ La Loma del Angel (1987). In La Virgencita del Bronce, Espinosa replaces novelistic characters with actors wearing puppets rigged to their heads. He transforms Cecilia Valdes’ colonial settings into panels of painted scenery, hauled on and off stage by actors dressed as slaves. Former tropes of veiled secrecy and ‘life-like’ representation convert into the sexually illicit and melodramatic performances of flesh-and-blood actors. Espinosa integrates his audience into the key acts taken from the novel. Rather than constrict the representation and speech of diverse identities, his stage directions allow for improvisation. Like Arenas and Morúa Delgado, Espinosa guides 21st century Cubans to lay claim to their own representation of themselves within present day Havana. This presentation and my analysis bring Cecilia Valdés into the framework of contemporary Cuban Studies by questioning national representation and queering the realist tradition.

Author

• Vanessa A Nelsen, Emory University