Chavela Vargas, with her deeply emotional, harrowingly heartfelt voice, is famous for her canciones rancheras, challenging conventions and her famed love affairs with powerful women, including a rumoured night with Ava Gardner.
Born in 1919 in Costa Rica, Vargas left for Mexico aged 17.
In Mexico, she re-moulded Ranchera music. Typically associated with heterosexual men lamenting their love for women, Vargas refused to change the pronouns in her music, directing her music at women. Vargas unashamedly performed wearing men’s attire, ponchos, trousers, hair-up and without makeup which, mixed with her deeper voice, questioned the definitions of gender and its relationship with music.
Whilst many say Vargas’ sexuality was an important source of inspiration for her music, others are less aware, as music professor Ana Alonso-Minutti points out: “Everybody knows who Chavela Vargas is, not everyone is conscious of (or wants to talk about) her queerness”.
Vargas herself, despite challenging gender conventions and not hiding her sexuality, did not come out until her 80s in her autobiography, Y si quieres saber de mi pasado (And if you want to know about my past).
Later in life, particularly around the release of Chavela, a documentary on her released in 2017, Vargas became more open about directly discussing her lovers and their connection with her music.
Perhaps her most impactful love was her affair with Frida Kahlo, who she refers to as “mi gran amor” (my greatest love) and she recalls Frida saying “I gave birth to you” as a way of articulating how interconnected and deep their love ran.
In her thirties, Vargas started having success with her music. It was around this time she met Frida, an openly bisexual Mexican artist renowned for her affairs whilst being married to fellow artist Diego Rivera.
In the documentary, Vargas discusses the night they met at one of Frida’s parties, “I sensed that I could love that being with the most devoted love in the world, the strongest love in the world”.
Whilst Vargas claimed she destroyed all of her and Frida’s correspondence, letters remain between Frida and others, including one to the Mexican poet, Carlos Pellicer, in which she writes “Today I met Chavela Vargas. Extraordinary, lesbian, what’s more, I desire her”.
Many have described the intensity and electricity between the two, and much like the power of a lightning bolt, it came and went in a flash, with the affair ending with Vargas leaving and never coming back, having moved in with Frida and Diego at La Casa Azul.
In 1961, Vargas recorded ‘La Llorona’ (the weeping woman), which, in typical Ranchera style, laments for the love of a lost lover, which Vargas sings with such pain and inconsolable desolation, “Si ya te he dado mi vida Llorona. ¿Qué mas quieres? ¡¿Quieres más!?” (“if I have already given you my life, weeping woman, what else do you want? Do you want more!?”). This Mexican folk song draws on the tale of La Llorona, a ghost returning to mourn her dead children, who she drowned in anger following her lover’s betrayal. Yet despite its traditional roots and many interpretations by different artists, the two have claimed it as their own: Vargas’ rendition of the song helped popularise it, and she dedicated it to Frida, who she would sing to while Frida painted. Frida’s painting The Broken Column, is a self-portrait of her crying which many argue is an indication of Frida identifying as La Llorona and in the 2002 Frida biopic, Vargas can be seen serenading Frida (played by Salma Hayek) singing ‘La Llorona’.
This was not Vargas’ only contact with film. Vargas developed a close relationship with Spanish filmmaker, Pedro Almodóvar. Her songs were used in his films, such as ‘Si no te vas’ in Julieta. However, the two had more than just a work relationship, often supporting each other through their recoveries from their respective addictions, Vargas having struggled with alcoholism. Almodóvar paid his love and respect for her in a farewell letter following her death in 2012, in which he described himself as “your husband, in this world” and that her music could “turn abandonment and grief into a cathedral in which there was room for everyone and from which you emerged reconciled with your own mistakes, and willing to continue committing them, to try again”.
Vargas was not only a respected musician; the Latin Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences awarded her the Lifetime Achievement Award. But as Alonso-Minutti explains, she was also “a kind of grandmother figure to a whole generation of queer people in Mexico”. As a lesbian singer, it would be reductive to reduce her down to only her sexuality, as she was a multifaceted and talented woman. Having said this, her queer identity allowed her to inspire queer generations after and for that, she has become a role model for the LGBTQ community in Mexico.
Image Credit: “CHAVELA VARGAS (17/04/1919 — 05/08/2012)” by inmemoriamday is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.