Performing to a Captive Audience: Dramatic Encounters in the Borderlands of Empire (original) (raw)

2018, Cambridge History of Latina/o Literature

Hispanic settlers throughout the Americas deployed religious performances and dramatic acts to signify and to impose a sense of spiritual and cultural bond(age) to a new audience: the people they were seeking to conquer and subjugate. This enforced western aesthetics staged novel cultural performances of newfangled hierarchies of power. Colonial performances displaced, replaced, repressed and criminalized the cultural practices of the colonized native inhabitants after casting them first as pagan, and then increasingly as demonic.1 In many areas now incorporated into the U.S., from Puerto Rico to California, the cultural patterns of an emerging latinidad were fraught with the original sin of this bondage, a captivity presented as the cultural bond of a new community where colonial hierarchies of race, class, and gender determined the legitimacy of aesthetic knowledge(s) and practices. Throughout this chapter, I trace a number of performative acts in the long history of the colonization of the North American continent by evoking a fragmented narrative of cultural encounters. In this narrative, Hispanic colonizers and a diversity of indigenous peoples engaged in the tense production of mutual knowledge through corporal performance art ranging from military spectacle to religious acts to pantomime and drama. This framing of Hispanic/Latino culture in the colonial period and beyond as performed to a captive audience, for a public incarcerated within the matrix of colonial power, seated within the confines of the Western episteme and defined as a passive spectator in need of cultural, religious conversion, allows me to critically reflect on the ethos of performance and the archives of the public stage to further disclose their foundational epistemic violence. While the scattered archival records of over three hundred years of settlement and contact highlight the wide use of music, dance, as well as drama, as a tool for the theatricalization of the colonial regime, they also confirm their relevance as a