SOMETHING FIERCER
FORMER CANADA READS WINNER CARMEN AGUIRRE’S NEW MEMOIR IS MORE THAN BRAVE — IT’S DAUNTLESS
SHE MOVES THROUGH EVENTS RATHER THAN LEAVING US MIRED IN PAST WOUNDS
Atraumatic event might conclude after an hour or two, but the story it ignites in the mind, body and soul of the attendant person will write itself in fire over the course of a lifetime. Lifetimes — for very often, trauma splits one into many, and the greatest task is in bringing those multiples eye-to-eye.
Carmen Aguirre is a Chilean- Canadian actor, playwright and now two- time memoirist with a passion for existence that belies an unusually agonizing past. The follow- up to Something Fierce, her bestselling debut, Mexican Hooker # 1 doesn’t frontload the agony, moving laterally, almost casually, through the violent and disrupting events that brought Aguirre to her present state. Ensconced in her first year of training as an actor, she realizes “I would have to find a way to desegregate my life, to become whole and integrate it all in order to bare my true self.” It is an astute moment of self-awareness, and a key to the various stories through which she is simultaneously leading us.
The first of these stories picks up where 2011’s Something Fierce leaves off, with Aguirre introducing herself as a tough- ass, funny, compassionate revolutionary with an i dentity riven between disparate nations — the cool-hearted safety of Vancouver, where she moved as a child, to the musical, amber- cast Chile from which she and her family were forced into exile during Augusto Pinochet’s 1973 coup. A freedom fighter to her core, Aguirre returns to South America in her late teens as part of the MIR — the Revolutionary Left Movement — and literally marries herself to the resistance in the form of a kind man named Alejandro. All before she turns 20.
Aguirre’s colourful recollections of these days are tender and occasionally sentimental, as anyone’s telling, tortured by yearning, would be. Her love for her lost nation is as heartbreaking as her realization during a brief stint in California that she is brown — and therefore destined to be marginalized, no matter what she feels herself to be. Pushed out of her country of birth, and othered in her place of supposed refuge, the duality takes seed early in Aguirre’s heart, cultivated and nourished by what is to come: notably, her rape at the age of 13, which would be “…always present, never dealt with.”
This defining attack is touched upon only briefly in the first half of the book, during moments where the aftereffect made itself known in ways that push the teenaged Carmen even further away from self- knowledge. Aguirre explores the pain and frustration of this as she describes her first year of theatre school at Langara College’s conservatory, Studio 58, in Vancouver. Here, in the vacuum of theatrical training, she must be vulnerable, open, available to every feeling. And yet she is surrounded by triggers — not only by being one of the only people of colour in the program ( she defiantly wears a button that says Token Minority), but by the privilege of her co- students, who at the end of her training reveal that they didn’t believe the torture and oppression she witnessed and experienced in her homeland until they read it in an Amnesty International report.
Aguirre excels at lightly recounting the degrading experiences she is put through in theatre school, and is remarkably free of bitterness as she describes some of the trials thrust upon her. The eponymous Mexican Hooker refers to a first-year progress session with the directors of her program. “During my talk,” she says coolly, “it was mentioned that I was entering a racist business where more often than not I would be offered Mexican hooker and Puerto Rican maid roles. Was I sure that I wanted to continue?” It is a reminder, even within the tiny school that she auditioned to get into, that she is the outsider, and there’s only more to come.
Years later Aguirre would, incidentally, play not only a Mexican hooker but a variety of other stereotypical Latina roles in film and TV — a scan through Aguirre’s ample IMDB filmography offers proof of this. But on a more gutting level, the title points to the central trauma that fuels the memoir’s trajectory.
Barely a teenager, Aguirre and her younger cousin Macarena are assaulted mere steps away from their school, sadistically tortured while Carmen is raped by a serial offender divertingly nicknamed the Paper Bag Rapist for the way he covered his victim’s faces. This is a man to inspire nightmares, and Aguirre’s handling of the rape itself, as well as her reckoning with it after the fact, is nothing short of astounding. Here, there is neither sentimentality nor detachment. Vivid and poetic, Aguirre fastidiously isolates the moment where she was broken in two, spiritually and physically. In one of many haunting passages, she describes how her attacker, John Horace Oughten — pointing a gun at her head — tells her that she’s a hooker; that he’s simply doing what she incited. Forcing this narrative on her, and calling the rape “making love,” proves as disruptive to Aguirre’s sense of herself as the physical violence of his act.
Yes, this is a book that draws tears, but Aguirre is a merciful dramatist at heart, and so she works to move through events rather than leaving us mired in past wounds. Her powerful heart and appetite for experience ensures that the story, despite being one of trauma recovery, never feels maudlin or torturous.
Mexican Hooker #1 is more than brave — it is dauntless, and Aguirre’s telling of it, even in its devastating moments, accomplishes what she set out to do: integrate it all in order to bare her true self.