Biographies illustrate. By reading them, we delve into the stories and knowledge of others, we understand their weaknesses and also the successes that mark their decisions. Delving into the life and work of famous people, statesmen and rockstars makes us more objective and empathic, so much so that we stop envying their successes, for being part of the effort that cemented them.
Films are an excellent dissemination and knowledge tool. I understood the character and training of Mahatma Gandhi, thanks to Richard Attenborough’s film (1982), in the same way that I approached the dilemmas of the talented Mozart thanks to Milos Forman’s “Amadeus” (1984) and I became aware of the abuse and discrimination against people with disabilities with the film “My left foot”, which narrates the viacrucis of the writer, poet and painter with cerebral palsy, Christy Brown, with the direction of Jim Sheridan and the interpretation of the Oscar winner, Daniel Day- Lewis.
Originally from Tupelo, Mississippi, where he was born in 1935, Elvis Aaron Presley is equally recognized as “the king of rock and roll” as one of the most representative symbols of post-war American culture.
I bring it up for the latest Baz Luhrmann production, “Elvis” (2022), starring Austin Butler and Tom Hanks. In it, the producer introduces us to Presley’s life through the artist’s relationship with “Colonel” Tom Parker, his representative for almost twenty years. In addition to listing Parker’s abuses, his gambling addiction and the schemes to boycott the international tour that the singer so dreamed of, the film describes in detail the embezzlement of the promoter, the failed projects and the exhausting cycle of concerts in Las Vegas, which He ended up killing Elvis.
While it exhibits the actor’s pain and addiction to prescription drugs, especially codeine pills, the film offers a powerful component by showing Elvis’s natural affiliations with black music and the way in which it motivated his famous wiggle and influenced the freedom of his “remixes” made of rock, soul and gospel.
The first scene of the film is explicit: captivated by the cadence of sounds coming from the street, an innocent boy with white skin and blue eyes arrives at Ellis Auditorium in Memphis, Tennessee. The show captivates him, fusing him with the lofty delirium of a large group of people of color who indulge in evangelical music. The confused boy walks towards the center of the room, joins the song and begins to shake, possessed by the synthesis of voices and instruments.
The child’s state of communion is so intense that his eyes widen and the rhythm takes over his being. Impressed, some of the attendees try to make him see reason and get him out of the stupor that keeps him imprisoned. Don’t touch him!, orders the pastor, Don’t you realize that the young man is close to God and to the essence of him?
Today we know that the sensual and even erotic Elvis that so scandalized the segregationists did nothing more than incorporate the sensitivity learned in childhood, when he lived with his mother in a black neighborhood, while his father was serving a prison sentence.
The interesting thing about this fact is the situation. Being a white man who moved like a black man was inconceivable in the 1950s and 1960s. It was one thing for Rosa Parks to refuse to give up her seat to a white passenger in a truck in Montgomery and end up in prison for not doing so, or for Dr. Martin Luther King to march to Selma and Alabama and come to Washington to demand the right to the vote for the population of color, but a very different one was that a talented young white man opened the debate on equality from music. There were things that were wrong and the daring of the king of rock was intolerable. The Elvis of the beginning was out of place and if he succeeded, it was due to the weight of an audience just as young as he was and eager for creativity and talent.
After more than eight decades, it is unfortunate that police violence against blacks in the United States remains a constant, dwarfed only by the proliferation of shootings in schools and shopping malls.
Let’s not go that far: In 2011, the Committee to Eliminate Racial Discrimination (CERD-ONU) observed that in Mexico the Afro-descendant population was excluded from the National Population Census of the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI). The implications of this omission led to invisibility and hence to “non-existence” at the constitutional level. Can there be something more aggressive than oblivion?
Today we know from a 2015 census that the Afro-descendant population in Mexico in that year was equivalent to 1.16 of the total national census and that by 2020 there were 2,576,213 Afro-Mexican people, representing 2% of the total population of the country.
It is a pity that the intuitive militancy of Elvis Presley has remained in the music and does not prevail in our actions. Let’s not overlook it: Afro-descendants are one of the most violent and discriminated groups in our country, along with migrants and refugees, women, girls and boys, people with disabilities, members of the LGBT+ communities and people with disabilities. HIV.
There are still many pending tasks. It is necessary to recognize them.
art historian
Linda Atach Zaga is a Mexican art historian, artist, and curator. Since 2010 she has been the director of the Temporary Exhibitions Department of the Memory and Tolerance Museum in Mexico City.
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Elvis Presley and civil rights. A path of intuition.