Who is chavela vargas

It was two years after her return that Vargas found one of her largest inspirations; fellow queer artist Federico Garcia Lorca. We are also lucky in the fact we know for sure how she would have identified, as at the age of eighty-one she came out publicly as a lesbian. Though she had been open about sleeping with women long before formally proclaiming herself a lesbian, being able to put a label on her experience seemed to comfort her.

She reached the end of her life at ninety-three and spoke publicly about her feelings on death, saying:. It would be hard to argue that Vargas was not a brave woman, taking on challenge after challenge in stride and becoming one of the more iconic artists in her time because of her bold choices. It is equally hard to argue that she was perfect, as much as she had a level of self-determination that few ever find, she also had a level of separation.

Pouring out her emotions on stage, she seemed to have trouble keeping long term relationships, both romantic and platonic. Many described her as mysterious, and her longest romantic relationship ended because she was violent, which is inexcusable. Her longest relationship had always been with herself. And where she failed others, she worked her whole life to keep from failing herself. Bendix, T. New Now Next. Bush, J. Chavela Vargas. All Music. Chavela Vargas Film.

Garrido, I. Chavela Vargas Obituary. Lacey, L. She also had a passionate affair with Frida Kahlo around this time. In the s, she began singing at the restaurant La Perla in Acapulco, a popular international vacation spot.

Eventually, 15 years of alcoholism caught up with her, clubs stopped hiring her, and she fell into obscurity. When she was a teenager, Vargas left her native Costa Rica for Mexico.

The chanteuse told the story in various ways through time, so the details are murky. Sometimes a place. Sometimes the phrases that she remembered. But myths, as biographer Benjamin Moser puts it, are much more compelling than reality. After Vargas died, Moser wrote a piece about her for the New Yorker. Moser told The World that she transformed bar songs into art. In Mexico, Vargas cleaned houses and sang in the streets and in cantinas. Away from whatever. It was unconventional and powerful. And to myself.

She owed her prominence to no one—except, she said, to the Aztec gods. I had never conducted an interview in my life. Imagining that this Olympian figure would never deign to speak to a mere fan, I said that I was a journalist and, to prove it, bought a cheap tape recorder at the Miami airport. When I took it out of my bag, I first observed a rule I have since seen proven again and again: as a change comes over the features of a person being photographed, a voice that knows it is being recorded changes, too.

Before I turned it on, Chavela was relaxed. Here was the great singer, and here was her mythology—the Indian family that had saved her from alcoholism, for example, and the tribe that had anointed her a shaman La Chamana was one of her nicknames.