I was saddened to learn, a year ago today, of the death of José Dimayuga, a gay Mexican playwright and theater director.  He was only 57 years old.  I had recently been in contact with him about my translation of his play, Las Órdenes del Corazón, so I was stunned to learn of his sudden death.  In my email correspondence with him, he had seemed like a man of remarkable energy and creativity.  News reports about his passing were vague about the cause of death, but it doesn’t really matter how he died.  All that matters is that a great (and underappreciated) writer has left us far too soon.

I discovered his work in a gay bookstore in Mexico City in 2015.  I bought a paperback containing two of his plays, Las Órdenes del Corazón, and La Última Pasión de Antonio Garbo.  I was so delighted by Las Órdenes del Corazón (Orders from the Heart) that it became the first literary work that I attempted to translate from Spanish to English.  Like most of Dimayuga’s plays, Las Órdenes del Corazón is a comedy, and as is the case with many of them, the target of his humor is the strict gender norms (and extreme machismo) of Mexican society.  In this play, a pathologically jealous Mexican husband keeps his wife barricaded inside their apartment.  He won’t let her work, despite the fact that he is not making enough money to support them, and when he leaves the house, he blocks the front door with furniture so that she can’t get out. The poor woman is miserable, but help is on the way in the form of a butch lesbian burglar.  (I may have given too much of the plot away already.)  Las Órdenes del Corazón reminds me of James Kirkwood’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead, another play in which the protagonist’s life is changed by a conversation with a queer burglar.  It even occurred to me that Dimayuga might have intended his play as a Mexican homage to Kirkwood’s play, but it turns out that the resemblance is a coincidence. I mentioned it to Dimayuga, and he said that he had heard of Kirkwood’s play but had never seen or read it.

Translating Las Órdenes del Corazón challenged me more than anything else I have attempted to translate.  It is filled with Mexican slang and Mexican cultural references.  In fact, the slang isn’t merely Mexican; often, it is particular to Guerrero, Dimayuga’s home state, where most of his plays are set. In order to translate the slang, I often had to consult Mexican friends. But cultural references are even harder to translate, and I found myself relying on footnotes to explain Pedro Infante, Silvia Pinal, and other actors from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. Were it to be staged in the U.S., I doubt many American audience members would recognize these allusions, though they might feel compelled (as I did) to seek out these films and watch them.  (And the humor of the play wouldn’t be lost on them, even if some of the references were.)

Among my favorite Dimayuga plays is Una Mujer de Tantas, whose title is an allusion to one of the most admired films of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, Una Familia de Tantas, usually translated as A Family like Many Others.  Released in 1949, it is the portrait of a middle-class Mexican family with a strict, domineering father, one who treats his one son with indulgence but is a controlling tyrant with his daughters, two of whom rebel against his authority and find themselves disowned.  Una Mujer de Tantas is a kind of magical realist metaplay about a writer of radio melodramas whose characters come to life and interact with him.  One of those characters is a female serial killer, a woman who confronts macho tyrants and then murders them. But the play is perhaps more about the creative process—and about the commercial pressures that undermine writers—than it is about gender in Mexican society.  It is also the only play by Dimayuga that I have read that doesn’t have overt queer content.

Perhaps his most famous play is Afectuosamente, su Comadre, which has a difficult to translate title.  Technically, a woman’s comadre is the godmother of her child, but it is often used to mean a close female friend.  (Maybe “With Love, Your BFF” would be one way of translating it.)  It tells the story of an unlikely friendship between a conservative schoolteacher and a drag queen.  It’s also the only of Dimayuga’s plays that I have seen performed—and only because it was adapted into a film by Luis Zapata, Mexico’s most famous gay novelist, with whom Dimayuga had a 14-year relationship.  (Zapata is the author of El Vampiro de la Colonia Roma, widely considered the most important gay Mexican novel.)  In 1992, Afectuosamente, su Comadre won a national award for drama given out annually by the University of Nuevo Leon, el Premio Nacional de Dramaturgia.  From what I can gather from google searches, it is still frequently staged in Mexico.

In a 2012 interview, Dimayuga commended the “environment of greater freedom” that queer people currently enjoy in Mexico City, but he lamented the continuing discrimination and anti-LGBTQ violence in other parts of Mexico, including his native Guerrero.  He said that he was motivated to use his work to bring about social change.  He also complained about stereotypical depictions of gay characters on Mexican television.  I suspect he would have been delighted by the Mexican Netflix series La Casa de las Flores, and I’m sad he didn’t live to see the progress for LGBTQ people that is inevitable in Mexico—and that his work helped bring about.  As time passes, his reputation as a writer will surely grow in Mexico—and, I hope, in the rest of the world as well.