Choreographing Mexico : Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation - Manuel R. Cuellar

Choreographing Mexico

Festive Performances and Dancing Histories of a Nation

By: Manuel R. Cuellar

Paperback | 15 February 2025

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2023 de la Torre Bueno (R) First Book Award, Dance Studies Association

The impact of folkloric dance and performance on Mexican cultural politics and national identity.


The years between 1910 and 1940 were formative for Mexico, with the ouster of Porfirio Diaz, the subsequent revolution, and the creation of the new state. Amid the upheaval, Mexican dance emerged as a key arena of contestation regarding what it meant to be Mexican. Through an analysis of written, photographic, choreographic, and cinematographic renderings of a festive Mexico, Choreographing Mexico examines how bodies in motion both performed and critiqued the nation.

Manuel Cuellar details the integration of Indigenous and regional dance styles into centennial celebrations, civic festivals, and popular films. Much of the time, this was a top-down affair, with cultural elites seeking to legitimate a hegemonic national character by incorporating traces of indigeneity. Yet dancers also used their moving bodies to challenge the official image of a Mexico full of manly vigor and free from racial and ethnic divisions. At home and abroad, dancers made nuanced articulations of female, Indigenous, Black, and even queer renditions of the nation. Cuellar reminds us of the ongoing political significance of movement and embodied experience, as folklorico maintains an important and still-contested place in Mexican and Mexican American identity today.

Industry Reviews
Choreographing Mexico is a long-overdue critical study of Mexican traditional and regional dance known today as folklorico...[a] fascinating and well-researched volume...Cuellar proves that Mexican regional dance is a social embodiment that at times reproduces nationalistic tropes and at others critiques them. Choreographing Mexico is a rich exploration of how bodies in motion create and recreate the idea of a nation...Choreographing Mexico offers a welcome and new interdisciplinary look at folklorico dance as essential to Mexican cultural formations. The volume will be important for Mexicanists and scholars of dance and performance. Accessible to multiple audiences, Choreographing Mexico is for anyone interested in Mexican culture and anything Mexican. * Journal of Latin American Studies *
Cuellar's project advocates for an attention to dance and embodiment as a meaning-making practice and informs our understanding of how Mexican nationalism was choreographed onto the body. A wealth of archival images interspersed throughout the book compliments Cuellar's analysis. Heavy on theory, Choreographing Mexico would appeal to dance graduate students and scholars of Mexican history, nationalism . . . Cuellar's incorporation of his own experience as a teacher and dancer grounds the work's significance in the present and adds important and overarching insight to the ways dance forms community and contributes to individual and collective identity formation. * thINKing DANCE *

Ultimately, the book offers a rich cultural analysis of dance in connection with the national construction of Mexico, which also makes it possible to apply its ideas to other periods and cultural realities.

En definitiva, el libro ofrece un analisis cultural de la danza de gran riqueza en conexion con la construccion nacional de Mexico, posibilitando tambien aplicar sus ideas a otras epocas y realidades culturales.

* Hispania *
Choreographing Mexico is a vital resource for scholars researching Mexican performance forms and cultural history . . . Queering dominant narratives and reading representations of the popular against the grain, he disrupts conventional approaches to understanding a national past. Cuellar demonstrates how embodied expression can be a site of knowledge, a resource for historical research, and a practice of world-making. * Pacific Historical Review *
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 folklorico dance through the gendered/gender queer spectrum. Scholars as well as general audiences with an interest in Mexican diasporic identities as expressed through folklorico's embodied knowledges, and set in its evolving, contested histories, will find this volume a welcome addition. * Journal of Folklore *

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