Vivir la noche is a large format book with entire pages of photographs devoted to the nightlife of the mid-20th century. The nightlife was women taking their clothes off: La Tigresa, Sasha Montenegro, Lyn May, Olga Breeskin, Princesa Lea, Liza d’Liz, Giocona, Amira Cruzat, Atzimba, and many more. From that recurring past we can’t help but mention the most famous theaters: the Blanquita, the Follies, the Azteca, the Burlesque (now the Teatro de la Ciudad), the Tivolí in Garibaldi, the Vizcaínas, and the Clandestine. Also because another characteristic of the center of town was the incredible mobility of its establishments. Today they’re simply there, possibly managed by a great personality that tomorrow will fall into oblivion.
As the pages of this book prove, this type of show where women became the main attraction by stripping and which people attended in order to cleanse themselves via the erotic dances was an escape from the tiring blue-collar world. The accessibility that resulted from the Mexican miracle led workers to shows featured in magazines, sharing a space with the actresses they most admired and desired, was brought to an end with the popularization of television; however, it did represent a decisive influence in the culture that would be fostered in the following years, popular film that thanks to its popularity also retained a real but very poor image of the common citizen: womanizing, drunken, ill-spoken, loquacious, and charming man, a trickster. Mexican cunningness was given back to us in a context pierced by corruptions and by the sad relationships power established with its own culture, which it then pauperized.
In Vivir la noche those years are given back to us through the voices of Ivan Restrepo, who lived the nightlife from the Mexican jet set, a close friend of Gabriel García Márquez, husband of Margo Su, fan of Pérez Prado and María Victoria, who tells us about the attempts of conservative sectors of society to put an end to bad habits attributed to mambo and its dancing followers. Facing attacks against the freedom of these shows, dating houses, mid and low class liquor stores proliferated, they say that it was in these businesses that Álvaro Carrillo and José Alfredo Jimenez would end their lengthy parties.
Once inside of this changing voice specter, Marcela Lara, theater producer, tells us what it was like to stage an adaptation of Zola’s Nana, with La Tigresa, Irma Serrano, at the Fru-Fru Theater. At the time she was one of the most beautiful and powerful women —remember she was romantically involved with President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. And tells us anecdotes featuring this wealthy and intellectual stunner: Salvador Novo used sarcasm to deliver insidious criticism to the singer. The book mentions as specific scene: imagine the vestibule of the Fru-Fru, and standing before a horrible statue of La Tigresa, Irma asked the poet, whom she called “maestrito” (little teacher): “What shall we name the statue?” to which the poet answered: “Irma Serrano, exsimia”. “What are you trying to say, maestrito?” “That you will go onto history as an illustrious Mexican, but, at the same time, you’re also an ex-simian, since we all descended from monkeys…”
The stories told in the book passed by two photographers: Humberto Zendejas and Alberto Vázquez, by the memories of Luis Angel Silva Melon, a musician who experienced the uncertainty of living in bars since he often had no home of his own to shelter himself from the nights of the city, and at the same time it’s the story of a dancer who becomes a famous showgirl only to stop in her tracks under the fists of boxer Juan Ponce Guardián.
In the form of an epilogue: the return of the glorious past
Currently the Historical Center is experiencing a new boom. Some attribute this fashion to the 1970s when a group of poets, known as the Infrarealists, used its streets to be anarchic-poets, who stated that there was a single reason for opposing everything: they were changing Mexican poetry. It would be by the pen of Roberto Bolaño that in the 1970s, with Café la Habana, with Colonia Guerrero as the entrance to a decadent world like the year 2666, with Bucarelli as the corridor for their nights on the town, would make the city center the place to be. Today, an important literary scene wanders its streets recreating that recent past, changing into nightclubs, portrayed by this book, where Bolaño and his followers were regulars.
The world of ficheras has new fans: the hipster community, desperate to quench their snobbism and once again wander the Historical Center in search of an identity that high culture forgot about on purpose, because it no longer brought in the big bucks, or because their clients were forced to return to their homes and get drunk before their televisions because of the economic crises or due to the growing insecurities, convincing them of their failure as oscillating dogs in the light-filled night of the cabarets and rumba that unfolded in the city center’s golden years. Years that refuse to die, and which we can re-experience through the pages of the Vivir la noche.
Vivir la noche was published by Conaculta, it tells the history of the city through photographs and a narrative set in the polyphony of the multicolored voices that comprise it. Edited by Leon Saghon, Astrid Velasco, Fabrizio Leon and Horacio Muñoz, the book is about the city and its muddles; tales from different points of view that are somehow accomplices. Images that within their own obliquity show an essence of Mexico City’s Historical Center: everything seems to happen within its streets. Everything, it seems, has been buried and yet it returns with an unknown strength, photography’s encapsulated past is also the notion in which the present moves.
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