Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation examines folkloric dance and performance and its impact on Mexican cultural politics and national identity in light of historical precedents and contemporary implications. Mexican dance emerged in the post-revolutionary period as a contested site of Mexican nationalisms and embodied racial and gender debates. Choreographing Mexico encompasses rich primary sources, including ethnographic interviews, archival nineteenth-century periodicals, contemporary performance, and the fields of both film and dance. Embodied knowledges of contested social tropes, nationalisms, and Afro-Latin diasporas form the main basis for analysis. Perhaps most compellingly, Manuel R. Cuellar draws upon his own decades-long experiences as a dancer and choreographer to open the archives, written sources, and heteronormative narratives to the complexities of embodied knowledges as performed through dance. Through this methodological perspective, bodies themselves become enacted “texts” for analysis and developing theoretical frameworks. In this way, the work also moves beyond simply queering the archive or challenging heteronormative narratives. The synthesis of indigenous and regional dance styles in popular film, public festivals and centennial celebrations, and civic festivals, populates the introduction and the four main chapters.
Chapter 1, “Rehearsals of Cosmopolitan Modernity,” concerns the 1910 Porfirian Centennial Celebrations of Mexican independence. Cuellar analyzes these representations as spaces for national and international elitisms where exoticism forms projects in which elite bodies predominate in self-representations within that historical narrative. The narrative produced excludes Indigenous communities, relegating those Indigenous bodies to “prop” materials.
Chapter 2, “La Noche Mexicana and the Staging of Festive Mexico,” details Mexico City’s 1921 Chapultepec Park fiesta celebration. It was the initial such celebration on the heels of the revolutionary war that began in 1910. La Noche Mexicana promoted popular mestizo racial constructs in which Indigenous assimilation and acculturation were the norms in a spectacle that included a volcano replica, China Poblana dancers, and fireworks.
Chapter 3, “Nellie Campobello,” is the central focus of the book. It details Campobello's primary role in institutionalizing dance pedagogy as a field of knowledge in Mexico. Cuellar presents Campobello’s role for over forty years (1937-1983) as choreographer and director of Mexico’s National School of Dance. He discusses how Campobello’s choreography and dance career shaped educational practice in Mexican dance and the ways audiences would engage with racial and ethnic diversities and with diverse sexualities. The analysis of Campobello’s performance of El jarabe tapatío and her volume, Rítmos indígenas de México (1940), are particularly revealing.
Chapter 4, “Cinematic Renditions of a Dancing Mexico,” focuses on folklórico dance in the golden age of Mexican film during the 1930s and 1940s. Briefly, Cuellar argues that Eisenstein's ¡Que viva México! (1932), Fuentes's Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936), and de Anda's La reina del trópico (1946) present dancing bodies that broke apart predominant narratives of a mestizo nation and promoted images of festive Mexico. De Anda’s inclusion of the Afro-Latin diasporic La bamba draws particular attention in these pages. Ambivalence due to its ethnohistorical contradictions requires close analysis by Cuellar. Similarly, Cuellar addresses Eisenstein's experimental film techniques in the well-known and often cited Day of the Dead celebration depicted in the ¡Que viva México! epilogue.
The book’s epilogue solidifies the call to engage with historiography that departs from common epistemological tools in order to reveal cultural blind spots and to challenge utopian interpretations through dance as enacted and embodied knowledges. It also embraces folklórico studies as critical inquiry and scholarly production at the most nuanced level. Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation leaves the reader well-positioned to raise further questions about the implications of contemporary, embodied folklórico dance through the gendered/gender queer spectrum. Scholars as well as general audiences with an interest in Mexican diasporic identities as expressed through folklórico’s embodied knowledges, and set in its evolving, contested histories, will find this volume a welcome addition.
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[Review length: 636 words • Review posted on March 4, 2024]