Photo: Alberto Morales
Dance is a powerful language of culture and identity. When we think of Spain, flamenco often springs to mind. Similarly, ballet folklórico likely represents the national dances of Mexico for many. Manuel R. Cuellar’s award-winning book, Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation, delves into the world of “Dance Mexicano,” specifically examining Mexican regional and traditional dance from the 1910s to the 1940s. Cuellar, a scholar of Latin American literature and a folklórico dancer himself, argues for a broader understanding of historical archives to include these embodied practices. His research, utilizing photographs, news articles, and film footage, offers a unique queer decolonial perspective on Mexican dance and its role in shaping national identity.
Choreographing Mexico is significant because it uses dance to explore the complex relationship between national identity, representations of Mexicanness (lo mexicano), and physical embodiment. Cuellar reveals how dance performances in public spaces both reinforced and challenged the nationalist ideologies of post-revolutionary Mexico. While much scholarship has focused on post-revolutionary Mexican modernism in areas like literature and muralism, Cuellar expands this conversation by highlighting dance and the moving body as key expressions of lo mexicano. He emphasizes that the transient nature of performance and the expressive potential of the dancing body allowed for diverse and sometimes contradictory interpretations of Mexicanness to be displayed simultaneously.
The initial chapters of the book investigate how bodies moved within public performances and festivals, particularly considering the presence of Indigenous and rural dancers and spectators. These chapters explore how these performances contributed to the representation of Mexican modernity and reflected the lasting impact of colonialism. The third chapter shifts towards a more direct choreographic analysis, focusing on Nellie Campobello, a crucial figure in establishing dance as a nationalist discipline in post-revolutionary Mexico. Cuellar offers a queer and subversive reading of performances by Campobello and her sister Gloria. He demonstrates how their embodiment of lo mexicano both aligned with and resisted Mexican nationalist ideals of heteronormativity and gender roles. His analysis of the Campobellos’ interpretation of El jarabe tapatío, a quintessential “dance mexicano,” is particularly insightful. By portraying a traditional heterosexual Mexican couple—el charro and la china poblana—the sisters simultaneously upheld nationalist imagery while subtly queering and centering womanhood within this representation.
The final chapter turns to the Golden Age of Mexican cinema (1930s-1940s) to examine the role of race in national belonging and modernity. In the epilogue, Cuellar incorporates an auto-ethnographic approach, reflecting on his own folklórico dance practice and the colonial influences within archival research. He addresses how knowledge is disseminated and how focusing on dance can challenge Eurocentric perspectives on knowledge creation and transmission. For Cuellar, Mexican popular dance serves as “a generative site of political enunciation,” raising questions about how embodiment and the physical presence of bodies contribute to the formation of modern Mexican ideologies.
Drawing on performance studies scholar Diana Taylor’s concept of the archive and the repertoire, Cuellar considers both tangible historical documents and intangible embodied knowledge within cultural traditions. He asks: How can the lived experiences of dancers within a cultural tradition complement or even contradict the information found in traditional archives?
By incorporating the theories of Latinx queer scholars such as José Esteban Muñoz, Juana María Rodríguez, and Ramón Rivera-Servera, Cuellar’s queer archival research gives visibility to marginalized and underrepresented perspectives. Through this lens, he argues that while dancers performing Mexican nationalism often adhered to the prevailing ideologies of their time, they also possessed the agency to challenge norms and push the boundaries of gender and race expectations.
Ultimately, Cuellar’s work champions the importance of dance and embodiment as meaning-making practices. Choreographing Mexico enriches our understanding of how Mexican nationalism was physically inscribed onto bodies through dance. Though rich in theory, the book is a valuable resource for dance scholars, graduate students, and anyone interested in Mexican history and nationalism. While some prior knowledge of Mexican colonial history, Afro-Mexicanidad, mestizaje ideologies, and post-revolutionary politics would be beneficial, Cuellar’s inclusion of his personal experiences as a dancer and teacher grounds the book in contemporary relevance. This provides valuable insights into how dance builds community and shapes both individual and collective identity.
Manuel R. Cuellar, Choreographing Mexico: Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022.
https://utpress.utexas.edu/9781477325162/
By Amy Schofield December 18, 2023
