Lucha Reyes

Abstract

This article apprehends the namesake coincidence between two cultural icons of the Américas, Lucha Reyes Aceves (1906-1944) and Lucha Sarcines Reyes (1936-1973). Both twentieth century popular singers emerge from spaces of radical difference and affinity (across temporally distinct gendered, racial, class subjectivity). The author contemplates their singing and its significations in tandem, locating their genealogies and/or legacies not within country, say, but in a dynamic of correlation. In doing so, the author proposes a tocaya (namesake) technique as a method to hear how one Lucha may resonate in another Lucha, a gesture that derives from an ethics of interrelation articulated in Chicana feminist inquiry. Tocaya, a colloquial term of endearment, here participates as epistemology alongside a motley methodology including cultural-historical, literary and biomythographical interpretation. The provocative semiotics of their name (Lucha signifying “struggle”) further catalyzes another analytic, la voz que hace la lucha, that speaks to singing histories from subalternity. Hearing through refraction and tangency, via a transhistorical pairing, yields an extraordinary detail that repeats with them and within others: a singing of self-making and self-consciousness, where voices can be seen, and mirrors heard.