Brawn Quixote

In four centuries of existence, Don Quixote has suffered his share of indignities: being knocked on his keister by a windmill, mistaking a flock of sheep for an army and inspiring some of the kitchiest artworks ever pawned off on impressionable tourists. So has his creator, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, who had to put up with an anonymous author ripping off his literary creations and putting them in a bogus “Don Quixote” sequel.

Those blows, however, apparently were nothing compared with the outrage that some in this provincial capital feel over the image chosen to represent the annual arts festival dedicated to Cervantes, his novel and its monumental legacy.

For three decades, the Festival Internacional Cervantino has been one of the biggest, most prestigious arts showcases in Latin America. A 2 1/2 -week extravaganza of music, theater, dance, art exhibitions and conferences, the festival is meant to display Mexico’s cultural savoir-faire and emphasize its deep roots in Spain’s 17th century Golden Age, when writers Cervantes and Pedro Calderon de la Barca and painters Diego Velazquez and Francisco de Zurbaran, bestrode Western Europe like giants.

But the heated debate over this year’s official poster design suggests that Mexico’s relationship with its cultural heritage, like Cervantes’ classic story of a deluded but well-intentioned knight errant, isn’t as simple as it might first appear.

The controversial design, created by the Mexico City husband-wife team of Luis and Lourdes Almeida, shows a buff, handsome young man, naked from the waist up, wearing a ruffled collar, quill pen in hand, casting a pensive gaze at the viewer. His features -- spiky hair, strong jawline, bee-stung lips -- are accented by several metal loops impaling his ears, nose, chin and eyebrows, and his right arm bears a tattoo. His retro-contemporary, metrosexual cool suggests a sort of Castilian royal-court makeover of Adam Ant -- Queer Eye for the High Renaissance Guy.

Practically the minute the poster was unveiled publicly last April, local politicians began denouncing it as an affront to Mexican moral values -- and they haven’t stopped since. “This kind of poster looks like this person is doing drugs. It doesn’t look like a really positive person,” says Ricardo Alaniz Posada, mayor of the neighboring city of Leon, which hosts a number of Cervantino events. Alaniz Posada thinks the image sets a poor example for young people. “When you put these things in your skin,” he says, referring to the body piercings, “it doesn’t send a good message. When you are going to look for a job, it’s better to go in a suit.”

On the contrary, the Almeidas argue, their design honors the festival’s historic pedigree and pumps some adrenaline into an event that is trying to lure new audiences. The couple believe that their image simply reflects the style of many 21st century Mexican young people while also acknowledging that in his own time Cervantes was regarded as a bit of a kook, a cultural renegade whose bold vision resulted in a brand-new, aptly named literary art form: the novel. “He [Cervantes] was not accepted. He was thought to be crazy,” says Luis Almeida, during an interview with his wife at her Mexico City studio.

What’s more, the couple note, this year, for the first time in the Cervantino’s history, the poster design was chosen from a group of more than 400 entries by a seven-member jury that included some of the leading designers in Mexico and Latin America. Despite that seal of approval, the Almeidas say, a group of politically conservative, mostly Roman Catholic public officials from Mexico’s National Action Party rejected the jury’s unanimous hand-picked winner.

Luis Almeida says of the officials: “Always they have manifested their religious character, their provincial character, their close-minded character.”

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Small-town morality

The Almeidas say that their design also embodies Cervantes’ spirit of radical inventiveness in another way: Though the poster’s main image was constructed from a photograph taken of a young Mexico City actor, Manuel Medina, his tattoo and facial piercings were added later through digital manipulation on a computer. The composite image is a fabrication that, the Almeidas say, speaks to young peoples’ interest in virtual technology and also winks at the many sly artifices and literary sleights-of-hand that Cervantes packed into “Don Quixote.” If the Don’s image can handle Robert Goulet in a fake beard, why not a semi-nude Cervantes with a fake tattoo?

An uproar over a picture of a bare-chested man might seem surprising, given Mexican pop culture’s obsession with risque telenovelas and cheesy X-rated comic books. The country’s serious newspapers, let alone the tabloids, seldom miss a chance to flash a bit of gratuitous skin in their pages. And eroticized, sexually ambiguous images of men aren’t as taboo as they used to be: Last week Mexicans flocked to theaters to watch Gael Garcia Bernal looking very fetching in long blond tresses and high heels in Pedro Almodovar’s latest film, “Bad Education.”

But what’s permissible in Mexico’s raucous capital can still scandalize in stately provincial cities like this one, about five hours northwest of Mexico City. During colonial times, Guanajuato built its enormous wealth on the backs of Indian slaves forced to work in the mines, whose serpentine tunnels are now used as car lanes. During the last century, it took staid Guanajuato several decades to honor its most famous son, the painter and staunch Marxist Diego Rivera, whose boyhood home near the city center now houses a museum dedicated to his early life and work.

That tension between creativity and caution, youthful exuberance and genteel appearances, is still evident in Guanajuato’s celebrated festival, which runs through Oct. 24. Years before the Cervantino officially launched in 1972, theater students at the University of Guanajuato had been performing sketches from Cervantes’ life and writings in the Santa Roque Church plaza, where some events still are staged.

During the Cervantino, artists and audiences of many different stripes mix comfortably in the city’s elegant venues, like the famous Teatro Juarez, and in the streets, where many free events are staged. Among this year’s more outre attractions is performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena, who is unveiling his “Etno-Tecno” “freak show” of costumed characters, including “Frida Sadomasoca,” a transgender fusion of Frida Kahlo and Freddy Krueger.

But in recent years, as young people began flocking to the city to share in the good-times atmosphere, the festival acquired a different reputation as Mexico’s biggest open-air cantina. In response, the police began cracking down on public drinking and against tourists sleeping in the streets.

Ramiro Eduardo Osorio Fonseca, the Cervantino’s Colombian-born director general, says the festival’s frat-party reputation is exaggerated. Last year about 250 criminal incidents were reported, but the vast majority were minor infractions, he says. “For this amount of people, it’s very small.” Even so, he says that festival organizers are trying to reduce such occurrences while broadening the festival’s appeal as it approaches the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first part of “Don Quixote” in 1605.

Despite the official hue and cry, the bad-boy, rad-body poster was much in evidence during the festival’s opening weekend. “Cervantino” banners hung from virtually every wrought-iron balcony in town. Musicians slapping bongos and strumming guitars wandered the streets, or jammed outside the Museo Iconografico del Quijote, which boasts what is billed as the world’s largest collection of Quixote-related artworks: bronze busts, oil paintings, drawings and 12-foot sculptures of the wild-eyed “Knight of the Sorry Face” with his barber’s-basin helmet askew on his head.

Whatever else they’re arguing about, most involved with the festival agree that “Don Quixote” is still the alpha and omega of Spanish-language literature, a text second in sacredness only to the Bible. “Quixote is the first James Bond, the first Batman, the first Superman,” says Luis Almeida. “He’s the great educator of his time.”

At the Italian Coffee Co., just up the street from the Teatro Juarez, waiter Guillermo Rosales, 22, says he doesn’t know whether the new poster is good or bad. But Rosales, sporting painted black fingernails, a pierced lower lip and a New York Yankees baseball cap, believes the image succeeds in conveying the idea that a 16th century author of prodigious imagination can have something in common with the teens and twentysomethings roaming Guanajuato’s winding alleys. “There’s a duality,” he says of the image.

Was he planning on attending any of the Cervantino events? “Yes,” Rosales says, “but only the free ones, because it’s too expensive,” unless he comes up with some unexpected cash. Bigger impossible dreams have come true.