Laura Anderson Barbata — who was a visiting artist with the UW-Madison Arts Institute for the 2015 spring semester — was back in town on April 10. She gave a guest lecture on her fascinating new book, The Eye of the Beholder: Julia Pastrana’s Long Journey Home.
When doing research for an Isthmus profile on Barbata, I realized I had read about her work in a 2013 New York Times article describing her success in repatriating the remains of Julia Pastrana from Norway to Mexico. Pastrana was taken from Mexico and exhibited as a “freak” for her excessive hair. When I finally made the connection that the artist I had read about was same artist I was writing about, it hit me that of course she was the person to have accomplished this.
While observing Barbata’s lectures and interactions with students and artists, and witnessing her project STRUT!, a festive community procession around the Capitol Square, I was struck by her ability to foster connections.
At her lecture, Barbata detailed her long journey to restore dignity to Pastrana, a fellow Mexican who suffered innumerable indignities while she was alive. Barbata provided a clear-eyed account of the work she conducted for almost a decade, enlisting the help of collaborators, including scientists, elected officials, activists and fellow artists. This navigation through a complex maze of bureaucracy is a testament to Barbata’s tenacity, and her new book is an ultimate expression of the respect she shows to others.
Pastrana was born in 1834 in a small village in the Mexican state of Sinaloa (Barbata’s home state). Due to genetic abnormalities unknown at the time — congenital generalized hypertrichosis terminalis and severe gingival hyperplasia — her body and face were covered with thick, dark hair and her gums were overdeveloped. Her mother died when Pastrana was young, and her uncle sold her to a traveling circus. Later she moved into the home of Sinaloa’s governor, where she received training as a mezzo soprano and dancer. She also became fluent in English and French (in addition to Spanish and Cahita, her native language). Pastrana, now a curiosity and commodity, performed on tours and met U.S. entrepreneur Theodore Lent, who convinced her to marry him and became her manager. They toured extensively in Europe, where she was billed as “the bear woman,” “half human, half beast, “ marvelous hybrid” and “the nondescript.”
In 1860, while in Moscow, Pastrana bore Lent’s son, who shared her condition. The baby died 35 hours after birth and Pastrana passed away five days later (Lent, ever the exploitative huckster, sold tickets to view her in the hospital). Lent then sold the bodies to a Russian doctor who was eager to test his embalming techniques. Years later, Lent reclaimed the bodies and began displaying them in a glass case — and charging admission for exhibits. Pastrana and her son’s remains were bought and sold many times over the years, and were exhibited at carnivals and fairs in the United States as late as the 1970s. In the late ’70s, thieving vandals broke into a storage warehouse in Norway and the baby’s remains were tossed into a field and eaten by rodents. Pastrana’s embalmed but damaged remains were recovered from a dumpster and wound up in a closet in the basement of the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Oslo. Some restorative work was done on Pastrana’s mummy before she was returned to storage again for decades.
Stefan Falke
Laura Anderson Barbata at her studio in Soho.
Barbata become aware of Pastrana’s story when she worked on design elements for a production of Shaun Prendergast's The True History of the Tragic Life and Triumphant Death of Julia Pastrana, the Ugliest Woman in the World, a play her sister, Kathleen Anderson Culebro, produced and staged in Texas in 2003. Moved by Pastrana’s plight, Culebro began a petition to repatriate Pastrana’s remains. Soon after, Barbata was invited to Oslo for another project and began, in earnest, to secure the repatriation. Early on, Barbata’s work to reframe the debate about Pastrana included placing an obituary in an Oslo paper and organizing a Catholic mass in her memory. After almost a decade of work, Pastrana’s coffin was buried in Sinaloa de Leyva on February 12, 2013, with official ceremonies, a funeral mass and traditional procession. Her coffin was covered in flowers donated from people around the world through the “A Flower for Julia” campaign, established by Barbata. Pastrana was buried in a custom traditional huipil garment crafted by a master weaver, with a photo of her son placed on her chest. Her thick-walled tomb was covered in concrete to prevent vandals from disturbing her final resting place.
Photos and videos in Barbata’s lecture underscored the barbaric treatment of Pastrana, who was described by those who met her as charming, thoughtful, warm and talented.
The Eye of the Beholder: Julia Pastrana’s Long Journey Home, co-edited by Donna Wingate (view some sample pages here), is a study in care and reverence. The rich burgundy fabric of the cover surrounds the only known photo of Pastrana taken during her lifetime. It is just one of the many images that were carefully researched and reproduced for the book. Often Pastrana was presented in a hyper-feminine fashion — wearing ornate dresses, adorned with ribbons and jewelry and holding flowers. Pastrana’s story is seen through the lens of essay contributors Jan Bondeson, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Grant H. Kester, Bess Lovejoy and Nicholas Márquez-Grant. While the treatment of Pastrana as described in the book shocks and saddens, it’s ultimately a story of kindness.
Barbata continues to celebrate Pastrana through art. She shared that she is motivated “to honor and reconstruct Pastrana’s identity and dignity that were denied to her all this time.” An opera is in the works, and she is creating a series of zines focusing on different themes connected to Pastrana: beauty, human trafficking, marketing, violence and how language and images shape views of ourselves and others.
The inscription on Pastrana’s tombstone includes the words “rest in peace.” They have rarely seemed so poignant and necessary.