Theatre and Cartographies of Power: Repositioning the Latina/o Americas ed. by Jimmy A. Noriega, Analola Santana (review)

As their title indicates, in this book, Jimmy Noriega and Analola Santana explore new ways of understanding Latin American and Latino/a theatre by taking a wide and inclusive approach to theatrical practices and practitioners. Utilizing a clever strategy of mapping “cartographies of power,” the introduction to this book strives “to complicate and (re) envision the spaces and significances of Latin American and Latina/o performance practices” (1). It disrupts a hierarchical way of understanding the Americas as North/South or West/East binomials, recognizing that the theatre of the Americas benefits from a new “approach [that] argues for a scholarly shift from the United States as America to the United States as part of the Americas” (5; emphasis in original). Their inclusive and fluid study of theatre in the Latino/a Americas results in a compilation of quite distinct voices from scholars, artists, and practitioners whose points of view and relations to the theatre vary, sometimes drastically. The book offers this plethora of voices in order to expand the notion of what and how theatre and performance practices from this hemisphere are produced and studied.

The volume is divided into five parts, each of which offers examples of how key scholars and artists in the field define, understand, and even complicate their own theatrical cartographies. In the first part, “Crafting Theoretical Frameworks from beyond the US Borders,” Violeta Luna, whose powerful photograph graces the cover of the book, is the first of many artists in the volume to focus on images of bodies as political spaces and territorial constructions. With introspection on her performance piece Vírgenes y Diosas, she explores the “cultural in-betweenness” (27) of popular culture, Mexican Catholic, and Aztec iconographies. Ileana Diéguez writes about the current violence in Mexico through the lens of how pain can be experienced in performance (46). Focusing on different performative practices that call attention to the forty-three students disappeared form Ayotzinapa, she argues that it is impossible to imagine ourselves separate from the victims. Jorge Dubatti demonstrates how the concepts of teatro-matriz and liminality help us to think beyond what is usually categorized as “theatre” to consider theatre as part of a larger network that explores the human condition.

In the second part, “Rethinking Histories of Geography,” artists and scholars revisit how conquest and colonialism restructured the geopolitical understanding of the Americas. Gad Guterman and Brian Eugenio Herrera study the encounters between colonizers and colonized. Herrera’s historical essay argues that conquistador Oñote’s auto (1598), performed in what is now New Mexico, was the first of such brutal spectacles of dominance that would allow subsequent “enactments of encounter” as didactic Spanish performances of conquest (84). Guterman shows how Fernando de Orbea’s late-seventeenth/early eighteenth-century piece La conquista de Santa Fe de Bogotá (Colombia) is a resistance play that, through invention and imagination, conceives of new ways to be a criollo. Diana Taylor offers an excellent analysis of Earth by renowned Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo, in which the artist uses her body to expose violence that relates to her and her country: genocide, violence against women, and colonialism. Artists Migdalia Cruz and Virginia Grise offer their own personal journeys as migrating bodies that occupy different spaces, cultures, and languages.

One of this volume’s major contributions is its examination of race and ethnicity from Brazil, Panama, and Indigenous communities in Mexico. In part 3, “The Historical Body: Race and Ethnicity,” Katherine Zien offers an excellent study of the representations of race, class, nation, and empire in minstrel acts in the Canal Zone in the early twentieth century. Similarly, Carlos Cortez Minchillo studies race relations in Brazil through an analysis of black theatre groups such as Teatro Experimental do Negro (1944) and Bando de Teatro Olodum (1987) that have created new spaces for black actors and audiences. Debra Castillo looks...