‘Please don’t let this be a scolding!’ I thought as I moved past this book’s tempting title to read the author’s bio, noting that she is ‘the chair of the Writing Programme at Columbia University’. Sure enough, the very first line of the prologue – ‘The sound of a diva’s voice was how I knew we were Mexican’ – made me fear that this might be the case. Funnily enough, my mother was also fond of the diva in question, Vikki Carr – especially the sob-fest ‘It Must Be Him’ – and my family weren’t Mexican as far as I know.
My scolding radar flared up even further on seeing the word ‘queer’ in a quote on the back cover by one Farah Jasmine Griffin (the author of the very scoldy-sounding Read Until You Understand): ‘A people – brown, black and queer – too big, bold, beautiful and messy to be confined within enclosures or by borders.’ Queer – that’ll be bored and boring straights piggybacking on to minority status for moaning purposes. Funny how ‘gay’ used to annoy some people; these days it comes as a blessed relief. To paraphrase Hilaire Belloc: Always keep a hold of ‘gay’/ For fear of finding ‘queer/ them/they’.
Part memoir, part manifesto – that by taking divas as role models, oppressed people may break the chains that hold them back and enjoy their place in the sun and the light of the glitter ball – this book begins when Deborah Paredez’s hard-working Mexican parents move from a Hispanic district of Texas to an Anglo one in the early 1970s. Paredez is praised for her bookishness by ‘well-meaning’ teachers – the rotters. Her parents encourage her to speak English at home rather than Spanish – the poor dupes.
You’d think that this was a good thing – the melting pot and all that – but for Paredez, it apparently triggered a lifetime of ‘otherness’. It’s great to be proud of one’s culture, but she uses the word ‘brown’ to describe herself so much that it becomes something of a nervous tic. Often paired with ‘folk’ (always a clunky, somewhat comical word, as in the much used ‘trans folk’), the style quickly becomes wearisome. And if we are going to obsess about colour, it’s not really accurate to call Cher ‘white’ when her ancestry is Cherokee Native American and Armenian.
Like a lot of people who’ve done well in life, Paredez exhibits a kind of nostalgia for a trauma she didn’t experience. She writes that when her parents cranked Vikki Carr up high,
it exposed us to others… the trim white mothers who sat around kitchen tables… three doors down, the Irish Catholic family ate cheese sandwiches cut into triangles… we were Mexican, we were the ones who turned up the music and put dancing toddlers on tables and stayed up past twilight.
There’s something so ignorant and divisive about this. Most of the families in my working-class Anglo neighbourhood also behaved this way. Music is often how different cultures meet and meld, and it seems graceless to try to fashion it into a weapon of grievance. I was also given the ‘ick’ by the way Paredez stereotypes her own culture: ‘So deliberately sentimental… so Mexican… the melodrama of it all!’
This is a self-pitying book which bemoans the plight of ‘others like me who are rarely invited to join in the choruses of America’s anthems’ and refers darkly to ‘how I came to know my place’. You’d think Paredez was a Fentanyl addict on Skid Row rather than a professor at Columbia University. It’s worth noting that the great song ‘America’ from West Side Story – which Paredez rightly spends much time rhapsodising over as an authentic brown diva moment – was written by a male Jewish homosexual. Melting pots, don’t you just love ’em!
Is it really true that ‘the idea of freedom in America’ is ‘founded on the bondage of others’? Paredez writes that her mother and other Hispanic children ‘went to the same schools as the white kids, which is not to say they received the same education’. How did that work? Were the children of Hispanic descent removed from the Anglo majority class in order to be encouraged to speak in Spanish and listen to sentimental, melodramatic Mexican music? I’d have been interested to read Paredez’s views on why the Latino vote has leant so strongly towards Trump in recent years after being solidly Democrat – but that might have thrown up some actual chewy food for thought rather than the green smoothie of clichés this book is largely composed of.
How can someone write so freely about the inherent ‘queerness’ of divas and not even mention Dusty Springfield? The scandalous sapphic Callas of blue-eyed soul destroyed dressing rooms by throwing things around – including a ginger wig she spitefully called ‘Cilla’ – and ran over an old lady while driving at night wearing dark glasses. She remarked after her court appearance: ‘Nobody seems interested in the damage the old lady did to my car!’ Maybe because the book isn’t really about divas at all.
It’s a great subject – and a great word. Diva! It feels onomatopoeic; like Viva! it seems to demand an exclamation mark. But, yet again, a joyful thing has been shaved and scolded down into yet another culture-war gripe – the most un-diva like action imaginable. To finish where we started, my mother didn’t have a clue that Vikki Carr was Mexican, and if she had, she wouldn’t have cared. That – unless one is a professional grievance-seeker – is a good thing, not a bad one.
Comments