Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West: How the First Generation of Mexican Americans Fashioned a New Nation by Andrew Gibb (review)

Unlike other scholarly monographs that seek to explain the transition from Mexican Alta California to U.S. California, Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West details the collaboration and confrontation that occurred between Californios and Anglos within a theater studies framework. Moving away from inherently political and economic spaces, Andrew Gibb focuses on performative events like weddings, theater productions, and even the 1849 California Constitutional Convention to demonstrate that intercultural collaboration, rather than conflict, shaped the social reorganization of Californian society from the mid-1830s to the 1850s. Rather than treat 1850 as a moment of rupture, Gibb argues for continuity because, as he explains, Anglos, as cultural heirs of an oligarchic society constructed by Californios, attempted to bring the region under U.S. authority through the perpetuation of the old California system.

Since the inception of New Western History, historians have focused on the social world of Californios and the Indigenous to prioritize non-Anglo and non-male experiences in the making of California as a U.S. state. In Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque, NM, 1999), Albert Hurtado explores the intersections of sex, gender, and culture in a multicultural frontier space to reveal how Californio ideas about sexuality and family organization shaped systems of power on California's multicultural frontier. Most recently, in Colonial Intimacies: Interethnic Kinship, Sexuality, and Marriage in Southern California, 1769–1885 (Norman, OK, 2018), Erika Pérez traces the significance of interethnic kinship, sexuality, and marriage in Southern California to emphasize that Indigenous, Californio, and biethnic women partook in the negotiation of power during the Spanish, Mexican, and early U.S. periods. Californios, Anglos, and the Performance of Oligarchy in the U.S. West builds on these works by employing performance, broadly defined, as a lens to study how the cultural negotiation between Californios and Anglos resulted in the perpetuation of Californio systems of power in an Anglo-dominated society.

Gibb's work is commendable for its application of performance studies to the political and economic challenges in transitional California. His work demonstrates that the "Mexicanization" and "Americanization" of the region and its people occurred simultaneously and shaped contemporary power systems. Gibb opens his study with the de la Guerra Wedding Party, a celebration of the 1836 marriage between Anglo Alfred Robinson and Californiana Ana María de la Guerra, to demonstrate that weddings in mid-1800s California were performances of power and dominance in which all members of society were expected to act in accordance to the power hierarchy. During the wedding, patriarch José de la Guerra exhibited his wealth by welcoming and providing for the entire Santa Barbara community. At the wedding, patriarchs performed masculinity by dancing around Californiana women who performed their femininity by standing passively. The non-elite, Mission Indians and Mexican laborers, danced at the appropriate times and validated the Californio performances of power and wealth. Gibb contends that the de la Guerra wedding demonstrates how an Anglo man, Robinson, was "performatively assimilated" into the Californio oligarchy (65). Gibb also demonstrates that Anglos employed theatrical performances, like Fourth of July reenactments, to present a vision of the future in which Californios and Anglos maintained control of local oligarchic structures under the U.S. government. Crucially, such performances built alliances between Anglos and elite Californios.

Moving from the innately performative to the incidentally performative, Gibb explores the drafting of the California Constitution in Monterey in 1849. His analysis focuses on the performances of power that occurred in the homes of the Monterey elite rather than the clashing of interests during the delegations. Focusing on the hospitality of Californiana Dona Angustias de la Guerra Jimeno, Gibb reads the convention proceedings alongside...