This placement was historical. Frida Kahlo and Chavela Vargas were real-life contemporaries and, by many accounts, lovers. When Chavela sang "Tengo miedo torero" in the context of Frida’s life, the meaning shifted again. It became a lament for the pain Frida endured—her physical suffering, her tumultuous marriage to Diego Rivera, and her inability to hide her true self from the world.
Why do we still listen to a song about a ghost and a bullfighter in the 21st century? In an era of auto-tuned perfection and curated social media lives, "Tengo miedo torero" offers something increasingly rare: Tengo miedo torero
Lemebel was a writer, performance artist, and chronicler. He came from the tomas (land seizures) of the poor. He was also a radical queer who rejected both the homophobia of the traditional left and the classism of the gay elite. His prose in Tengo miedo, torero is a riot of sensory overload. This placement was historical
Lemebel sets his love story against this explosive backdrop. He takes the grand, masculine narrative of revolution and guerrilla warfare and filters it through the domestic, the sentimental, and the queer. It became a lament for the pain Frida
: Lemebel employs a strategy of eliciting sympathy by appealing to the reader's emotions, a hallmark of his broader work known as
Por Las Locas: The Differences of Pedro Lemebel - Matthew Cheney