"'A GROUP OF MEXICANS . . . will illustrate the use of the lasso': Charreada Performance in Buffalo Bill's Wild West"

In recent scholarship concerning Buffalo Bill's Wild West, cultural critics have tended to focus on the show's engagement with period discourses of nationalism and on the closely related project of constructing race in the nineteenth-century United States. In most instances, when race is the lens through which the Wild West is viewed, Amerindian company members are the subject of inquiry.² This is entirely appropriate, as those performers and their performances were the primary representations of racial Otherness offered by Buffalo Bill's Wild West. The Amerindian experience is also the most complex case study with regard to labor relations, due to the intense attention governmental agencies paid to Amerindian employment during the period.³ And, yet, Amerindians were not the only racial Others presented by the show. From the show's earliest years until the final performances, the management of Buffalo Bill's Wild West employed actors identified as "Mexican" in the show's publicity. The appearance of those performers under the identifier "Mexican," which during the period was at least as much a racial distinction as it was a national one, suggests that the show's racial mythology of the Old West might better be characterized as tripartite, rather than dualistic (cowboys, Indians, and Mexicans, instead of simply cowboys and Indians).⁴ While this has important ramifications for our understanding of the myths about race the show constructed, it also raises questions about the intent and agency of those performers who were hired to play "Mexican." Contextualizing the actions of individual Wild West performers within the Mexican American performance tradition of charrería, I contend that those actors saw themselves performing a particular version of American identity, one that was inclusive of Mexican Americans, and that worked to undermine the show's nativist publicity.⁵

Speculation about the intent of historical performers is, of course, a fraught enterprise.⁶ In the present case, the attempt seems even more inadvisable given the dearth of primary sources. The "Mexican" performers in the Wild West shows, in common with most populations of color in the United States of the time, wrote about their experiences far less frequently than their White counterparts.⁷ What is more, among those individuals who have found a place in the historical record, exact citizenship status is frequently unclear. Any conjecture about the "Mexican" performers' sense of identity, national or otherwise, must therefore remain only that: conjecture. Even so, the indeterminate nature of those actors' nationality is no mere accident of the theatrical archive. Beginning in the decades that preceded the US-Mexico War of 1846–48, and continuing through the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, whites who were busy constructing an Anglocentric notion of an "American" nation consistently found it useful to conflate Mexican cultural heritage with Mexican nationality.⁸ Buffalo Bill's Wild West unquestionably contributed to the defining of "America" as white, and the conscious framing of "Mexican" performers by the show's producers deliberately obscured their nationality. Nevertheless, the direct and contextual evidence presented here supports the contention that some, and perhaps most, of the show's "Mexican" performers were US citizens. How those men would have chosen to self-identify is uncertain. There is little to suggest that the English language in the late nineteenth century offered any option other than "Mexican." The alternative term "Mexican American," according to Chicano historian Rodolfo Acuña, did not enter into wide usage until the decades following the First World War.⁹ That does not mean, however, that previous generations of Mexican-descended US citizens did not embrace both their nation and their cultural heritage simultaneously, in a fashion that the later phrase "Mexican American" was coined to convey. In the interest of recognizing the complexity of the Wild West performers' identity construction, I employ the term Mexican American when writing about individuals, even as I recognize it as anachronistic. By way of distinction, I will use "Mexican" when referring to the conflated ethnic/national construction presented through the show.

The management of the Wild...