From Statecraft to Stagecraft: The Politics of Peddling Mexicanidad in U.S. Entertainment, 1886-1906
Chambers, M
2020
Abstract
"From Statecraft to Stagecraft" tells the layered story of how representatives of the United States and Mexico peddled performances of mexicanidad, or forms of Mexican identity, to sell products, entertain audiences, and advance commercial and state interests. Amidst the vast technological and economic changes in American culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ethnic Mexican performers showcased mexicanidad on U.S. commercial stages for the first time since 1848 when Mexico lost half its territory to the United States. Growing cities like Boston and Chicago featured Mexican performers in paid entertainment and amusements, creating public spaces where spectators observed and consumed Mexican culture for pleasure in exchange for a fee. For spectators, that social contract (amusement for a fee) opened up ‘new ways of seeing’ ethnic Mexicans, including learning about Mexico, witnessing Mexican culture performed live in safe and enclosed spaces, and walking away with a newly perceived understanding of Mexican culture. Their experiences took place within the context of U.S.-Mexico bilateral engagement. One country pursued opening up Latin American commercial markets on behalf of U.S. business interests while the other sought a steady stream of investments to buttress its international standing. Not far behind were American businessmen seeking to incorporate this transnational cultural movement into economic success. At a time when emerging globalization altered the economics and politics of both countries, statecraft produced, and diplomacy distributed, marketable representations of Mexico and Mexicans in the United States. Ethnic Mexicans performed in cultural productions such as the Aztec Fair and Mexican Village in 1886 Boston, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 Chicago, and in wild west shows across the country well into the early twentieth century. These performers shared their skills, talent, and knowledge with millions of entranced audience members, forging new and not-seen before versions of Mexican identity. Over time, however, popular narratives constructed Mexican culture as primitive and backwards, irretrievably defining Mexicans living in the United States -- even those who were U.S. citizens by conquest or birth -- as unworthy of joining or belonging to the American polity. Competing versions of mexicanidad in an American marketplace commodified racial differences and cultural identity for mass consumption. As cultural production moved from statecraft to stagecraft, the visuals of live Mexican performance diverged wildly from the Mexican state’s desired vision of a modern bourgeois nation. Instead, mexicanidad on stage transformed from proud theatrical moments into a negative visual shorthand through which paid entertainment defined Mexican performers as non-white, unmanly, and foreign. Due to unequal relations of power based on racialized and gendered frameworks, the Mexican government and the performers’ desire for positive images in the United States was insufficient to overcome the weight of white supremacy and the political power of the expansionist United States. Representations of mexicanidad reified into visual tropes, detrimentally giving credence to violence against Mexican communities in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands while also excluding them from the protections and benefits of the U.S. state.Subjects
Borderlands history Mexican American and Chicano history Mexicanidad Late nineteenth and early twentieth century cultural history Gender studies U.S. history and cultural diplomacy
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