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  • Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism & Performance by Ruth Hellier-Tinoco
  • Sydney Hutchinson
Embodying Mexico: Tourism, Nationalism & Performance by Ruth Hellier-Tinoco. 2011. New York: Oxford University Press. 336 pp., 23 photographs, notes, references, index. $99 cloth, $29.95 paper.

This book, as the author herself states (191), is not an ethnography of a dance, but rather a historical analysis of the representational strategies of two types of performance associated with the P'urhépecha people of Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. Both the Night of the Dead (Noche de Muertos, an all-night cemetery vigil now accompanied by a music/dance festival and other touristic activities) and the Dance of the Old Men (Danza de los Viejitos, a comic masked dance featuring percussive footwork or zapateo) have become iconic embodiments of Mexican-ness, particularly through their respective central figures: the kneeling woman and the masked old man.1 Author Ruth Hellier-Tinoco focuses not on their movements, music, or other formal characteristics, but rather on their relation to nationalist and touristic constructions of folklore and indigenousness beginning in the post-revolutionary 1920s. And instead of constructing an ethnography of her own, she analyzes others' ethnographic interpretations.

The book is divided into three sections. The first is an overview, the second a history, and the third analyzes reception, embodiment, and visual imagery. Running through the three sections is the theme of ideologies of performance, or as Hellier-Tinoco terms the concept, "performism." She defines this neologism as the "all-encompassing agendas, strategies, practices, and processes that entailed constructing and shaping concepts of peoples, bodies, activities, and places through display and reproduction" (240), and states that her goal is to examine the strategies of nationalist and tourist performism through the Old Men and Night of the Dead, using interdisciplinary methodologies to analyze the interactions of art, institutions, and people (27).

The book's main topic and contribution is thus the correlation of nationalist and tourist performance practices, discourses, and strategies. Hellier-Tinoco aptly points out that these twin contexts have similar needs and employ similar processes of essentialization. Specifically, Viejitos and Muertos performances contributed to romantic nationalism by representing an indigenousness linked to concepts of rurality and tradition, thus creating powerful icons of an "authentic" and unique national identity. Such representations are particularly important in Mexico because of the state's desire to reduce its heterogeneous nature to a single, unified one.2 The first chapter accordingly presents initial descriptions of both to show how they are used to embody the essences of Michoacán or of Mexico. The second chapter briefly discusses familiar social science concepts of nationalism, ethnicity, identity, tourism, performance, embodiment, and hegemony, each in a one- to two-page section. While this chapter offers little that is new to scholars, it may nonetheless be useful to students.

Chapters 3-9 present a history of the two performances' trajectories over the twentieth century. This section presents many intriguing anecdotes and avenues of inquiry, but they can often be difficult to uncover in the sea of details and "snapshots" of historical figures, performances, and theories. For instance, parts of Chapter 3 on the colonial and revolutionary periods will be review for those familiar with [End Page 134] Mexico; more useful are the discussions of a key magazine (Mexican Folkways) and two exhibitions that come at the end of the chapter. Though brief, they provide new information on how intellectuals and state institutions used performances like these to develop tourism and promote nationalism.

Chapter 4 focuses on the individuals involved in appropriating and displaying these events in the 1920s. At this time, a group of four influential intellectuals, including anthropologist Manuel Gamio, traveled to the Pátzcuaro region on a collecting mission, resulting in the dissemination of images and descriptions. Perhaps more important, key musicians such as the Bartolo Juárez family were brought to Mexico City to teach the dance and music. Intriguingly, while the Juárezes were literate musician/composers who also played European classical and dance music, they were depicted as "natural" musicians in order to better fit with the state's master narrative of indigenous purity.

In Chapter 5, the author shows how the touristic...

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