‘There was always a male gaze behind it': Madrid exhibition rewrites cliches of female Latin artists

The Guardian

12-04-2025

From the cha-cha-chá dancers of the 1950s to the fruit-heavy turbans of Carmen Miranda, and from the golden age of Mexican cinema to the emergence of salsa stars such as Celia Cruz, the world has not lacked powerful symbols of Latin womanhood.
But a new exhibition in Madrid is inviting visitors to look past the cliches and stereotypes of the past century and to reflect on the myriad ways in which Latin women, their bodies and their stories have made their way into popular culture.
All of the 500 items on display, which include posters, records, clothes and magazines, are drawn from the legendary Gladys Palmera collection, the world's largest private archive of Latin American music and accompanying memorabilia.
Although the exhibition, at the Casa de América in the Spanish capital, is titled Latina: Woman, Music and Glamour in the Gladys Palmera Collection, the show is an invitation to look beyond and beneath all the layers of expertly packaged glamour.
For Andrea Pacheco González, one of the exhibition's two curators, many of the familiar notions that have historically been attached to female Latin artists, such as exoticism, hyper-sexuality and diva behaviour, were well overdue a little interrogation.
'That whole narrative is very problematic,' she said. 'I think that's the main lesson of this exhibition. It​'s not 'the story of women'; it's the story of how women have been represented. Yes, we've got all the big stars, from the time they were most controlled by the industry, right up to the time when they were more emancipated … But it's the story of how women have basically been represented in the white, male, mainstream gaze.'
Pacheco's co-curator, Tommy Meini, said they were 'more interested in how some of these women were swimming against the tide; we like artists who fight for their place'.
Hence the very deliberate decision to begin the exhibition with Josephine Baker and her famous banana skirt. The African American singer, spy and civil rights activist took – and then subverted – colonial stereotypes and fantasies about Black women.
'She knew that she had to show herself and exoticise her body and give a new image,' said Meini. 'She really understood the vision of the era. No one knew where she was from: was she American or Caribbean or Latin American or African? That's why we start with her: she's a pioneer of everything that's led to Shakira … As a Black woman, she opened the way for other Black women – including African-Latin women.'
After Baker, the exhibition focuses on how Latin trends caught on in the US, where they were often exploited and repurposed.
'I think the big moment of US cultural appropriation – when that cultural identity was manipulated and whitened – came from the Hollywood industry from the postwar period to almost the beginning of the 1960s,' says Pacheco. Perhaps the most famous case in point was that of Carmen Miranda, the white Portuguese-Brazilian star who became known for her fruit hats and use of the outfits inspired by African-Brazilian female street vendors in colonial times.
Although the golden age of Mexican cinema in the 1950s offered viewers from Argentina to the US depictions of Latina women as strong and self-sufficient, its noirish rumberas genre also helped fuel the image of them as tropical femmes fatales – and made stars of actors such Ninón Sevilla, Meche Barba and Rosa Carmina.
Such shifts were mirrored in music. A decade later, as surf and salsa took off, magazine and album covers began featuring women in bikinis and, within a few years, the tame beach scenes had given way to more overtly sexualised images and nudity.
The exhibition also chronicles how the social and political revolutions of the late 1960s and the 1970s led female Latin artists to take control of both their careers and the things they sang about.
'There's a very strong movement, linked to music and the visual arts, that puts another kind of discourse on the table,' said Pacheco. 'You get a movement of Black artists who aren't hyper-sexualised – you see that Celia Cruz isn't in a bikini on her album covers. It's something else. These women control their careers, and we see that very clearly in a series of images in which Celia is with Willie Colón, and Johnny Pacheco – and she's on the same level as them.'
In parallel with all that, added the curator, came the evolution of the protest song movement and the success of a generation of singers – such as Mercedes Sosa, Violeta Parra and Chabuca Granda – who blended creole music and different regional folk music traditions in order to explore history and society.
The exhibition closes with footage from a 1978 documentary about the African-Peruvian artist Victoria Santa Cruz, in which she talks about her life and work and performs her famous song, They Shouted 'Black' at Me, which was based on her childhood experiences of racism.
'As time passed, I realised I wouldn't be who I am if it wasn't for that,' Santa Cruz muses in the documentary. 'I understood that negative things have their uses – if you use them and don't just accept them. Today, I thank God that someone called me Black because I realise that I am Black, but not Black like they said I was.'
Pacheco and Meini hope the exhibition will help visitors cast a fresh eye over some familiar images and to realise that none of them is neutral.
'Each image, each artwork – whether it's in the Prado or wherever – has a story and an ideology behind it,' said Pacheco. 'So if the image, or representation, of Latin and Caribbean women was done in a certain way at a given time, there was a very clear logic to it. That isn't just the way things were.'
For Meini, the show is a gesture of gratitude and respect towards 'all these artists who had to struggle, heart-and-soul' in their different eras. 'I hope it also serves to get people today talking about how while things may have changed, they haven't always improved,' he said.
Both curators admit being a little stunned when they decided to check how many of the items on show had been created by women.
'We realised that less than 1% of the 500 exhibits in this show were made by women,' said Pacheco. 'There's always a male gaze behind all this. That tells its own sexist story: there's a struggle going on both in front of, and behind, the camera.'