Fighting for their rights
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-bull0613,...
BY LETTA TAYLER
LATIN AMERICA CORRESPONDENT
MEXICO CITY -- Standing before a mirror in her dressing room, teenager Hilda Tenorio pulled on her hot-pink stockings and squeezed her petite frame
into a skin-tight, spangled suit. She bound her dark hair with a ruffled scrunchy and cast a lingering glance at her polka-dotted baby blanket.
Then she sauntered into an adjacent arena and killed a couple of bulls.
The crowd gasped in horror as Hilda's first victim, a snorting, 800-pound devil named Don Juan, knocked her to the ground and trampled her. But within
seconds, Hilda staggered back to her feet. Rising to the tips of her black slippers festooned with bows, she plunged her sword between Don Juan's
massive shoulder blades. As the beast crumpled, she wiped the bull's blood from her forehead and flashed a dimpled smile.
"Brava!" "Estupenda!" spectators roared.
Despite continuing resistance from male matadors and promoters, women are slowly but surely entering the quintessentially macho bullfight profession.
In Mexico, the profession's hottest spot after Spain, a dozen women are performing as novilleras, the first of two bullfighting levels.
How many will make the leap to the top rank of matadora, Spanish for a female matador, remains an open question. Of the half-dozen women who've been
anointed matadoras in the past half-century, only one, Mari Paz Vega of Spain, is currently practicing.
"It's hard enough for men to be bullfighters, but for women it's practically impossible," said Vega, who started in 1997. "We have to prove ourselves
twice."
That resistance may seem odd given that protagonists prance about in spangly capr?s and clever caps, swishing red capes and arching their backs like
flamenco dancers. But perhaps for that very reason, bullfighting remains one of the world's most fiercely male-dominated professions (it is not,
participants insist, a sport).
"The bullfighting establishment still looks upon women in the bullring as a circus attraction, like the bearded lady," said Muriel Feiner, author of
"Women and the Bullring."
Though novilleras are grudgingly accepted, hostility rises as women near or attain the matadora rank, Feiner said. "The fear is that they will show
the men up, do better."
When Spanish filmmaker Pedro Alm?dovar featured a matadora in "Talk to Her," his hit movie of 2002, he placed her in a coma.
Hopes are high that Hilda, who at 17 is Mexico's youngest -- and to many observers, its most promising -- novillera, will break the stigma. So far,
she said in a recent interview, she hasn't encountered the ostracism heaped on Spain's Christina S?nchez, who quit as a matadora in 1999, saying she
was fed up with constant taunts and stonewalling from matadors who refused to be billed with her and promoters who refused to book her.
"Most people are very affectionate toward me," Hilda said as she sat in Mexico City's famous Plaza M?xico, the world's biggest bullfighting ring,
waiting to eyeball the two bulls she'd kill later that day. "At first they might consider me a novelty, but then they see I can kill as well as a man
can."
'Dance of death'
Dressed in red cargo pants, a T-shirt and sneakers, the 5-foot-1 Hilda looked like a typical teenager as she fiddled with her cell phone and rolled
her large, dark eyes, which droop engagingly at the corners. Only a careful observer would notice the hook-shaped scar that begins on her left cheek,
moves past her left ear and ends near the top of her skull.
"The plastic surgery worked pretty well, didn't it?" Hilda offered nonchalantly of the scar she acquired 15 months ago when a bull gored her head,
back and right hand during a fight in the Mexican city of Le?n, laying her up for months.
"When the doctor was bandaging her up, she wasn't crying. She was totally calm. She kept asking, 'How soon can I go back into the ring?'" recalled
Hilda's mother, Hilda Pati?o, her voice dripping amazement.
The elder Hilda, who looks like a typical American soccer mom, accompanies her daughter around the country, helping her dress and kissing her cheek
before she goes out for the afternoon kill.
"I'd wanted her to be a violin player," confided Hilda's father, Fernando Tenorio, emitting a sigh as he waited for his daughter to finish studying
her latest victims. A physician with a gentle, bedside manner, he initially sought to dissuade Hilda by making her leaf through two medical textbooks
on bullfighting injuries.
"Once we realized this wasn't a passing phase, we've done our best to support her," Tenorio said. Still, he conceded, "we're always terrified."
The young Hilda shrugs off the fear. "Every time you enter the ring, you know you might not leave alive," she said. "The danger is always there. But
that's why it's the dance of death."
Women and bullfighting
Though most North Americans associate bullfighting with Spain and Hemingway, the practice dates to at least the Roman Empire, when gladiators fought
the horned beasts in the Colosseum. Artifacts depict female acrobats somersaulting over bulls in ancient Crete, but the first written accounts of
women actually fighting bulls come from 17th-century Spain.
Their limited participation caused a furor. "A monstrous public exhibition" and "the disgrace of the ... female sex," lamented 18th-century Spanish
priest Martin Sarmiento, according to Feiner's book. Spanish dictator Francisco Franco banned female bullfighting outright, but that law was dropped
after his death in 1975.
Consequently, many female bullfighters from Spain and the United States -- the latter bans the practice for either sex -- performed instead in Mexico.
But it wasn't until 1981 that this country's National Academy of Bullfighters elevated one of its own novilleras, Raquel Mart?nez, to the rank of
matadora. To get there, Mart?nez said she had to "wage war." "Fighting bulls was the easy part. Society was the problem," recalled Mart?nez, who
retired a few years ago and lives in San Diego.
"Sacrilege!" screamed newspaper headlines the day she debuted as a matadora in the border city of Tijuana. When she walked into the ring, she
recalled, "There were women in the audience yelling at me to stop."
Mart?nez, who gives her age as "early 50s," went on to become one of Mexico's most famous bullfighters. Even so, promoters refused to let her fight in
the hallowed Plaza M?xico. Hilda, in contrast, fought there last year.
"Raquel Mart?nez opened the door for many female bullfighters like Hilda," said Octavio Leyva, of Mexico's matador's association.
Still, bullfighting experts note, there are only a dozen novilleras in Mexico, several dozen in Spain and a handful in the other bullfighting
countries -- Portugal, France, Venezuela, Peru and Colombia. That compares with hundreds of male bullfighters, even though interest in the profession
is dwindling.
Most women who answer the call lead a nunlike existence. Though the days are long past that she had to shell out $200 of her family's money for each
bull she fought (and then find a butcher to dispose of the carcass), Hilda spends all her waking hours attending high school in her home city of
Morelia, or training or performing. She has no boyfriend -- though she says she never feels unfeminine as an aspiring matadora, a word that literally
means "killer."
Hilda repeatedly sidestepped the question of what goes through her mind at the moment of the kill. "It's part of the process," she said. "The
challenge is not the actual killing, which is technical. The challenge is being able to dominate an animal so rough and fierce and brave."
Marbella Romero, a pert, 28-year-old Mexican novillera who's been gored and trampled dozens of times, expounded further. "You play by the same rules
as the bull," she said matter-of-factly before a recent fight. "The bull never lets you make a false step, because if you do, it'll cost you a goring,
which is just like life." Asked whether she liked the act of killing, Romero replied, "Why not?" But, she added, "I feel horrible when I stab them but
don't kill them on the first try."
Though novilleras are professionals, they're only allowed to fight novillos, bulls that are three to four years old. If, as anticipated, the
bullfighting academy makes Hilda a matadora next year, she'll fight mature bulls, called toros.
Toros usually weigh a few hundred pounds more than novillos. Generally, they're also craftier. "It's the difference between playing a trick on a child
and on an adult," Hilda said. "You can pull the same trick on the child again and again. But you can't do that with an adult."
Still, Hilda knows better than to take a bull's gullibility for granted. Before every fight she receives her mother's benediction and recites the
bullfighters' prayer. "I offer my performance today to God and the virgin," she whispers before her hand-made shrine featuring virgins Guadalupe, the
cinnamon-skinned icon beloved by Latinos, and Macarena, the patron saint of matadors. "And if some mishap should befall me, I am in your celestial
hand. Take the animal off me and all will be well."
A play in three acts
There is no such prayer for the bull, which almost invariably dies, putting bullfighting near the top of the animal barbarism barometer in critic's
eyes.
On a recent afternoon at Plaza Ronda, a small arena in Mexico City, Hilda appeared to delight in tricking hapless Don Juan as she moved through the
three acts that constitute the bullfight.
In the first act, she darted about the ring, daring the galloping bull to charge her before the picadores moved in on their stout, blindfolded horses
to weaken him with lance jabs to the neck muscles.
In the second act, she took over the work of the bandillero, leaping in front of the bull with no cape to distract her prey, while plunging two barbed
darts adorned with colored ribbons into his neck as he charged her. No other female bullfighter in the world serves as bandillera. "Incredible!"
exclaimed Jose Ghilgliazia, 73, a weathered Mexico City locksmith who leapt to his feet as she jabbed her prey. "Better than many men!"
In the third act, she lured Don Juan increasingly close to her with passes of her red cape, sometimes letting his bloodied shoulders graze her body.
"Ol?! Ol?!" the crowd screamed as Hilda turned her back in seeming indifference, then swung to one knee in front of Don Juan, daring him to charge.
Foaming at the mouth and bleeding, the animal simply stared at her.
That was before Don Juan got a second wind, knocked her down and galloped over her. The crowd went so wild when Hilda jumped up and killed the bill
with a nimble jab, the judge awarded her the bull's ears and tail, bullfighting's highest honor.
Hilda has earned about 50 ears and a half-dozen tails from the 80-odd bulls she's killed since she started bullfighting 3? years ago. She sends most
of them to the taxidermist. Two tails from especially important fights are mounted on the wall of her family's living room, along with the head of
Promesa, the bull she killed last year in Plaza M?xico. The rest go to fans.
Judging from the clamor for autographs outside Plaza Ronda, Hilda gained many more admirers after her duet with Don Juan. Still, the 4,000-seat ring
was nearly half empty. "It's because she's a girl," said Georgia Velez, an arena attendant, with a resigned shrug.
"This is still a man's game, after all."
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