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Even as their nations and cultures were being destroyed by colonial expansion across the continent, American Indians became a form of entertainment, sometimes dangerous and violent, sometimes primitive and noble. Creating a fictional wild west, entrepreneurs then exported it around the world. Exhibitions by George Catlin, paintings by Charles King, and Wild West shows by Buffalo Bill Cody were viewed by millions worldwide. Norman Denzin uses a series of performance pieces with historical, contemporary, and fictitious characters to provide a cultural critique of how this version of Indians, one that existed only in the western imagination, was commodified and sold to a global audience. He then calls for a rewriting of the history of the American west, one devoid of minstrelsy and racist pageantry, and honoring the contemporary cultural and artistic visions of people whose ancestors were shattered by American expansionism.

Through performance and the spoken word, Yucatec Maya storytellers have maintained the vitality of their literary traditions for more than five hundred years.Telling and Being Toldpresents the figure of the storyteller as a symbol of indigenous cultural control in contemporary Yucatec Maya literatures. Analyzing the storyteller as the embodiment of indigenous knowledge in written and oral texts, this book highlights how Yucatec Maya literatures play a vital role in imaginings of Maya culture and its relationships with Mexican and global cultures.Through performance, storytellers place the past in dynamic relationship with the present, each continually evolving as it is reevaluated and reinterpreted. Yet non-indigenous actors often manipulate the storyteller in their firsthand accounts of the indigenous world. Moreover, by limiting the field of literary study to written texts, Worley argues, critics frequently ignore an important component of Latin America's history of conquest and colonization: The fact that Europeans consciously set out to destroy indigenous writing systems, making orality a key means of indigenous resistance and cultural continuity.Given these historical factors, outsiders must approach Yucatec Maya and other indigenous literatures on their own terms rather than applying Western models. Although oral literature has been excluded from many literary studies, Worley persuasively demonstrates that it must be included in contemporary analyses of indigenous literatures as oral texts form a key component of contemporary indigenous literatures, and storytellers and storytelling remain vibrant cultural forces in both Yucatec communities and contemporary Yucatec writing.

Building on research theorizing scale, this article proposes augmentations to existing frameworks that will help illuminate how localities are linked to 'stranger collectives' like nations, ethnicities, and global religious 'communities'. In this case of ethnic revival from Mexico's Sierra Mazateca, people use new vernacular literacy practices tied to local musical performances as a way of 'customizing' modular forms deployed by national and global institutions to manage indigenous difference. People 're-imagine' locality through a localized indigenous literacy that takes templates provided by the Mexican state and the Catholic Church and places them in productive tension with local context: musical properties of the indigenous language Mazatec, locally valued performance practices, and local musical-linguistic ideologies. While this revival movement draws on immanently modular forms, once locally embedded they become 'unpiratable', and constitute a new resource for inscribing local belonging. This case suggests the importance of considering linguistic and musical aspects of social context often taken for granted in anthropological investigations of scale. À partir de recherches théorisant la notion d'échelle, l'auteure propose des extensions aux cadres existants qui permettront d'éclairer la manière dont les localités sont liées à des « collectifs d'étrangers » comme les nations, les groupes ethniques et les « communautés » religieuses globales. Dans le cas de renouveau identitaire ethnique examiné ici, les habitants de la Sierra Mazateca, au Mexique, utilisent de nouvelles pratiques de littéracie vernaculaire liées à des représentations musicales locales. Celles-ci servent à adapter des formes modulaires déployées par les institutions nationales et mondiales pour gérer la différence des autochtones. Ils « ré-imaginent » leur caractère local par une littéracie autochtone localisée, qui s'empare des modèles fournis par l'État mexicain et l'Église catholique et les place dans une tension productive avec le contexte local : propriétés musicales du mazatèque, langue locale, pratiques d'exécution appréciées localement, idéologies musico-linguistiques locales. Bien que ce mouvement de renaissance s'inspire de formes intrinsèquement modulaires, celles-ci, une fois intégrées localement, deviennent « impiratables » et constituent une nouvelle ressource pour inspirer une appartenance locale. Ce cas suggère l'importance de prendre en compte les aspects linguistiques et musicaux du contexte social, qui sont souvent tenus pour acquis dans les investigations anthropologiques de l'échelle.

Amateur scholars, such as aficionados, fans, intellectuals, are rarely valued in the twenty-first-century academy, despite their often-encyclopedic knowledge. In this paper, I focus on Mexican aficionados of the popular Cuban music danzón to explore how these mostly older men manage social contexts where they are often marginalized. Drawing on Bourdieu, I examine how danzón aficionados negotiate their field of expertise by employing overlapping strategies: accumulating myriad \"facts\" and \"truths\", creating the possibility of ignorance in others, and competing for hegemonic masculine capital. I analyze danzón aficionados’ relationships with musicians and dancers, consider power dynamics between these aficionados and academics, and draw on Léon and Romero to discuss relationships between regional and hegemonic scholarship more broadly. I argue that beyond reflexivity and criticism, collective activism is required to reconfigure value systems and symbolic economies, and to fight institutional pressures to reproduce existing power structures.

Ask anyone to name an archetypal Texan, and you're likely to get a larger-than-life character from film or television (say John Wayne's Davy Crockett or J. R. Ewing of TV's Dallas) or a politician with that certain swagger (think LBJ or George W. Bush). That all of these figures are white and male and bursting with self-confidence is no accident, asserts Leigh Clemons. In this thoughtful study of what makes a \"Texan,\" she reveals how Texan identity grew out of the history—and, even more, the myth—of the heroic deeds performed by Anglo men during the Texas Revolution and the years of the Republic and how this identity is constructed and maintained by theatre and other representational practices. Clemons looks at a wide range of venues in which \"Texanness\" is performed, including historic sites such as the Alamo, the battlefield at Goliad, and the San Jacinto Monument; museums such as the Bob Bullock Texas State History Museum; seasonal outdoor dramas such as Texas! at Palo Duro Canyon; films such as John Wayne's The Alamo and the IMAX's Alamo: The Price of Freedom; plays and TV shows such as the Tuna trilogy, Dallas, and King of the Hill; and the Cavalcade of Texas performance at the 1936 Texas Centennial. She persuasively demonstrates that these performances have created a Texan identity that has become a brand, a commodity that can be sold to the public and even manipulated for political purposes.

Recent studies of the history of Mexican cinema continue to speak of the complex relations between the state and the film industry, and the most frequently analyzed aspects tend to be the same: the reach and forms of censorship, as well as the financial dependence on the state. To broaden this perspective, I propose a classification of cinematic discourses that represent the relations between film characters and state powers. I discuss four basic modes of representation that, determined by historical and economic circumstances, reflect and mediate the attitudes and dispositions of viewers toward the political regime. For each mode, I discuss a sequence in a paradigmatic film, analyzing visual and ideological aspects in relation to the political moment at the time of the film's release. Finally, I argue that, despite the resurgence of the Mexican cinema and a more critical tone in its approach to state institutions, fictional films still rest on indirect and allegorical representations of recent events. This is due to the uncertainty of the prolonged and still-incomplete transition to institutional democracy in Mexico. Estudios recientes sobre la historia del cine mexicano continúan informando sobre las complejas relaciones entre el estado y la industria fílmica, pero los aspectos más frecuentemente analizados tienden a ser los mismos: el alcance y formas de la censura, y la dependencia financiera del estado. Para ampliar esta perspectiva se propone una clasificación de los discursos cinemáticos que representan la relación entre los personajes de películas y los poderes estatales. Se discuten cuatro modos básicos de representación que determinados por las circunstancias económicas e históricas reflejan y median en las actitudes y disposición de los espectadores hacia el régimen político. Para cada modo se estudia una secuencia de una cinta paradigmática y se analizan los aspectos visuales e ideológicos en relación con la coyuntura política al momento del estreno de la cinta. Finalmente, se argumenta que a pesar del resurgimiento del cine mexicano y de un tono más crítico en su acercamiento a las instituciones del estado, el cine de ficción todavía descansa en representaciones indirectas y alegóricas de eventos recientes. Esto debido a la incertidumbre en la prolongada y aún incompleta transición a la institucionalidad democrática en la política de México.

In Mexico, the western state of Jalisco is popularly represented as the birthplace of mariachi. An excessively circulated national symbol, performances and performers of mariachi embody two important tenets of Mexican nationalism: machismo and mestizaje. In addition, Jalisco is also famous for its beautiful women, known for their light skin and piety. In this article I examine the increasing popular performance of women in all-female mariachis. Specifically, I am interested in how these mariacheras embody, mimic and contest their femininities in a highly gendered and racialized context in Jalisco. Au Mexique, la perception populaire situe dans l'État occidental du Jalisco l'origine du mariachi. Symbole national surexploité, les représentations et les performeurs de la tradition mariachi incarnent deux dimensions importantes du nationalisme mexicain : le machisme et le métissage (machismo et mestizaje). De plus, Jalisco est aussi réputée pour la beauté de ses femmes, reconnues pour la pâleur de leur peau et leur piété. Dans cet article, je m'intéresse à la popularité croissante des performances de groupes mariachi exclusivement composés de femmes. Je m'intéresse particulièrement à comment ces mariacheras incarnent, imitent, et contestent leurs féminités dans le contexte hautement genré et racialisé de Jalisco.

Based on fieldwork with the Yoeme (Yaqui) Indians of northwest Mexico, this article traces the ties between contemporary deer dances and pre-colonial deerhunting rituals. The author claims that indigenous performances provide documentary evidence not only of intercultural dynamics but also of how native people think historically about those dynamics. The essay details how, in Yoeme deer dancing, community members demonstrate collective identity as well as ontological and epistemological sensibilities. Additionally, it re-assesses the ethnohistoric utility of the term \"conversion\" when writing about colonial and missionary contact zones. As a research model, this project demonstrates the central role of performance studies within the field of folklore.

This volume maps out the continuous transnational dialogues that have informed culture and life at the U.S.‐Mexico border through the study of a wide variety of musical practices from the area. Without neglecting border musics that have been privileged in music scholarship (such as Tejano, corrido, and norteña) this book focuses on neglected indigenous, popular, and alternative musical practices in order to challenge biased understandings of the border as a homogeneous cultural area. The book’s multi‐disciplinary perspective offers a unique perspective to answer questions about the performativity of music within a politically and culturally contested geography.