Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio provides a well-documented, historical perspective on the development of the San Antonio Fiesta. Hernández-Ehrisman presents the San Antonio Fiesta as a cultural performance of community identity that has provided space for San Antonio’s socially and politically disenfranchised citizens to challenge the prevailing social order, often allowing them to make a more inclusive future by redefining their relationship as conservators of the past.
Hernández-Ehrisman opens her book with a description of herself as an adolescent parade participant marching in a yellow pioneer dress alongside a high-school float dedicated to the musical Oklahoma!. She describes the performance of her role as an Anglo Pioneer representing a musical version of the Manifest Destiny as a participation in a popular narrative of Western history. The author uses this experience to frame her argument that the San Antonio Fiesta not only reflects regional and national cultures, but also demonstrates the historical relationships between specific communities that create the unique civic culture in San Antonio. Fiesta, Hernández-Ehrisman demonstrates, has always been at the center of “changing power relations between women and men and Anglos and Mexicanos in defining the city’s public culture” (14).
In her first chapter, Hernández-Ehrisman elaborates on the role that elite Anglo women played in the creation of the festival in 1891. The women who organized the Battle of the Flowers parade were the descendants of Anglo heroes of Texan independence, and formed what Hernández-Ehrisman terms an Anglo “heritage-elite.” These wealthy Anglo women of the New South were able to claim a place in San Antonio’s civic life by invoking the authority of history and establishing themselves as the organizers of public commemorations of fallen male ancestors.
Hernández-Ehrisman notes that the role of elite women as the keepers of San Antonio history was fleeting. Within a decade, prominent Anglo San Antonio businessmen assumed control of the festival and sought to develop it into a Spring Carnival that would attract as many visitors to San Antonio as possible. Influenced by the success of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, the male social elite founded The Order of the Alamo, whose primary function was the election of a young debutante festival queen drawn from the ranks of the heritage-elite. Heritage-elite males also founded the male social group of the Texas Cavaliers in 1926 to elect a King Antonio, a figure meant to embody the heroic qualities of a Southern cavalier, to reign over the Fiesta.
While prominent society ladies had lost control of their festival and the election of its queen, Hernández-Ehrisman argues, heritage and commemoration continued to be a way that elite Anglo San Antonio women gained power outside of the home. In the early 1920s the San Antonio Conservation Society was formed to promote the preservation of Spanish colonial architecture and the city’s Spanish and Mexican heritage. Anglo society women began to create pageants and events in which they would dress in Mexican or Spanish costumes and have their Mexicana maids cook elaborate Mexican meals. In 1936 the Society added a Night in Old San Antonio to the events of the Fiesta. While Spanish and Mexican cultures were celebrated in a reified way by the Anglo heritage-elite, Mexican Americans in San Antonio were still largely excluded from the festivities.
In the 1950s, the supremacy of the San Antonio Anglo heritage-elite was challenged by the development of further Fiesta events such as the Fiesta Flambeau, which was presided over by its own Miss Fiesta. According to Hernández-Ehrisman, these events sought to bring a spirit of democracy to a formerly elite-dominated festival and appeal to the larger San Antonio community. Although some Mexican American women would be selected to serve as Miss Fiesta, the incorporation of San Antonio’s Mexican American citizens into the Fiesta festivities did not occur until the 1970s.
From the 1970s to the present, Hernández-Ehrisman asserts, the cultural and political changes in San Antonio that brought prominent Mexican American politicians and businessmen into the power structure of the city were reflected through the incorporation of Mexican Americans and African Americans into the festival. A carnival king, Rey Feo, representing San Antonio’s Mexican American community, was invented to challenge the sole rule of King Antonio, the Southern cavalier. Several Fiesta queens drawn from the Mexican American and African American communities were also added to the growing list of Fiesta royalty and challenged the sole rule of the festival queen elected by the Order of the Alamo.
Applying the theories of Edward Said’s orientalism and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of the carnivalesque and hybridization as reformulated by literary scholars Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, Hernández-Ehrisman skillfully analyzes the gendered and racial relations that have created the complex events of the current San Antonio Fiesta. Given the historical nature of her study, much of her data seems to come from published accounts of the festival, and she includes only a few quotations from personal interviews with festival participants. Anthropological folklorists may desire more extensive ethnographic documentation of how race and gender are articulated in contemporary San Antonio Fiesta events. Although Hernández-Ehrisman’s work is deeply rooted in the historical particulars of the San Antonio Fiesta, I would recommend Inventing the Fiesta City: Heritage and Carnival in San Antonio not only to scholars of the American Southwest, but also to folklorists interested in the politics of heritage, representation, commemoration, and in festival as a space to foment social change.
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[Review length: 899 words • Review posted on April 9, 2010]