Debbie Nathan

Kooler than Kahlo? “Whorehouse: Pseudo-journalists at a good price” Zócalo, July 2007

Did Frida Kahlo have spinal bifida? Does correctly guessing the Mexican left’s future lie in parsing its gusto for Canal-Street-style trinkets? Tune in, folks — below.

First, Frida’s medical problems. A New York Times story today about the artist’s current exhibit at Mexico City’s Bellas Artes museum notes that the show’s purpose is to get beneath the myths Kahlo spun around herself and which have since been tricked out, as her art, face, and Hollywood box office possibilities have been fully exploited — in coffee table books, cheap jewelry, tee-shirts, purses, and so on and on, sin fin.

The Times remarked that the pain and suffering in Kahlo’s self portraits came from injuries she suffered while young: first, a bout with polio, and later, a traffic accident involving a street car.

But last week, Mexico City’s newspaper Reforma ran a long piece on Kahlo, noting that most of her chronic pain came from having been born with incomplete closure of the spinal column: spinal bifida. Kahlo never talked about her spinal bifida, however. Apparently she thought the street-car-accident story was more … well … mythic. To my mind, for the Times to omit spina bifida in its Kahlo story contradicted the point of the piece. Oh well! It’s just the Times.

Anyhow, I never got to the Frida exhibit, because my plans to view her flashy paintings were waylaid by the siren song of bargain bling from Andrés Manuel López Obrador (nicknamed AMLO) and his leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD). I’d hit the streets Sunday morning, planning to visit Bellas Artes. But oops! It always happens. I got mesmerized by the Zócalo — Mexico City’s venerable town square. Its civic juice never fails to amaze.

Last time I was there (early May), I walked by accident into the logistics of a Spencer Tunnick nude shoot, where 18,000 people eventually showed up to take their clothes off for art. Fascinating — Bellas Artes could wait! This time, I spotted a crowd of 80,000 milling, marching and chanting. It was PRD’s first annual protest against July 2, 2006 — the day, PRD claims, that candidate Lopez Obrador was cheated out of the presidency by fraud.

Or, um, maybe it wasn’t a protest, but a celebration, since AMLO claims to be acting as president, complete with a shadow government featuring the “Secretary of This” and “Secretary of That.”

Mainstream Mexico press treats AMLO as a joke. Even many lefties are embarrassed by his refusal to admit defeat and seek more potent ways of doing politics. The Zocalo event I witnessed was a lot smaller, and — the papers said — more subdued than the electric, mass gathering that coalesced right after he lost the election. A friend in DF said many, if not most, of those 80,000 people in the Zocalo this time around are AMLO diehards in what now is shrinking to little more than a cult filled with old people and peasants who get trucked to AMLO events in free buses and, for their trouble, are given a much needed sandwich.

But hmmm. What about the tchotchkes??

They were everywhere. AMLO flags. Pirated DVDs of Italian and French movies. AMLO coffee cups. AMLO ballpoint pens. AMLO digital clocks. Faux designer scarves with PRD’s sunburst logo (Hecho en Mexico? Or en China?). AMLO shot glasses. AMLO dolls that say something when you squeeze them but I’m not sure what. Even “General Zapata” sliced white bread, looking every bit as overprocessed and avitaminized as Pan Bimbo. If the crowd was lackluster, you couldn’t say the same for the shlock. It was psychemodelickly vibrant.

Which started me thinking: How do you get left political organizing to tickle people’s libido with as much mojo as the right musters by tapping their deep, subconscious Jesus and anti-onanism fixations? Progressive movements worldwide are now experimenting with costumery, mummery, music, comedy, street theater. In addition, buttons and posters are now joined by tank top tee-shirts for sale, nutty post cards, rock CDs and even panties (remember all those 2000 and 2004 plays on “bush”?).

Good old, evil commodity fetishism, it seems, is one mark of a living, breathing Left. Maybe even in Mexico. I wish I could have bought a 99-cent store’s worth of AMLO products, but I still had to go through customs. I took these pictures instead.