It is difficult to find a precise definition
for the term “outdoor
drama.” Even on the informational webpage of the Institute
of Outdoor Drama, an organization sponsored by the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and dedicated to advancing the
outdoor drama movement in the United States, there is no single
definition of exactly what constitutes an outdoor drama.
Nevertheless, there is a set of general assumptions that can
be made: the
use of an open air stage venue, the presence of tourists in the
audience, the likelihood of music and spectacle as central to
the show. The Institute of Outdoor Drama website divides the
genre into three sub-groups: historical pageants, Shakespeare
festivals, and religious pageants. They provide the following
descriptions:
The outdoor historical dramas are original plays, often with
music and dance, based on significant events and performed in
amphitheatres located where the events actually occurred. Born
in North Carolina, uniquely American and epic in scope, they
focus on the people who shaped the heritage of the country, preserving
and bearing witness to the great things we've accomplished as
a state and nation. They are part of the travel and tourism industry,
designed to attract families on vacation.
Outdoor Shakespeare festivals produce full-length Shakespearean
plays, often in rotating repertory with the works of modern and
other classical playwrights.
Outdoor religious dramas include passion plays which dramatize
significant events in the life of Christ. These plays are based
on the text of the Bible and the Mormon drama (which chronicles
the founding and early history of the Mormon Church) based on
events described in the Bible and the Book of Mormon, a scriptural
text of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints published
in 1830.
As practitioners and academics, our gut response to outdoor dramas
tends toward mild revulsion or amused disdain; we generally dismiss
them as a legitimate field of study. But these performances,
with their song-and-dance reviews and reenactments, do serve
a significant, and largely unexamined, purpose. Paul Connerton
suggests, in his 1989 study How Societies Remember, that ethnographic
work often tends to “devalue or ignore the pervasiveness
and importance in many cultures of actions which explicitly take
place as a re-enactment of other actions that are considered
prototypical” (53, italics his). Such activity, which Connerton
terms “commemorative ceremony,” characterizes the
construction of outdoor dramas intended to depict significant
events of a culture’s past: historical pageants. They provide
a rich source of cultural information about the formation of
social identity – how it is collectively discussed, determined,
contested and affirmed.
Historical pageants undertake this project with particular fervor.
In his study of the pageants of the early twentieth century,
American Historical Pageants, David Glassberg outlines the visionary
work of William Chauncey Langdon – one of the great promoters
of “new pageantry” in regional civic theatre – in
using drama to engage the community in civic discourse. Langdon’s
ideas included the firm notion that a locally acted pageant provided
a stirring experience through which they could visualize solutions
to their current social and economic problems. Local residents
in acting out the right scenes from their town’s past,
present, and future would become more aware of the enduring traditions…[and]
how they must adapt those traditions to the direction of modern
social and economic progress. (Glassberg 71)
This belief is part of Langdon’s legacy to the production
of outdoor dramas in the US, where forty-five of the 113 productions
listed by the Institute of Outdoor Drama depict historical narratives
(Parker). Oftentimes, these serve as a primer for outsiders on
the self-concept of the community represented. After all, they
do purport to be the enactment of a given place’s history,
a representation of a community’s life. As such, they play
a notable role in shaping the perceptions of their audiences
regarding the performed group; indeed, they can be a primary
site for the construction and affirmation of local and regional
character. In describing themselves to tourists, producing organizations
also affirm group identity for the represented populace. In an
age characterized by increasing homogenization between communities – fueled
by burgeoning consumerism, global trade and interaction, and
dependence on technology – the task of creating and maintaining
a belief in specificity and local distinctiveness becomes more
critical for many communities, and the role of the historical
pageant becomes a site ripe for investigating the effort of human
collectives to shape and maintain identity through a belief in
a shared history and cohesive culture.
El Paso, Texas – my hometown – engages in this kind
of activity with a local historical pageant entitled Viva!
El Paso. The show occurs in an open-air venue at a local state park.
Unlike most plays of its kind, tourists make up a minority of
the audience base. Though a significant number do attend, local
citizens purchase the bulk of yearly tickets. For more than twenty
years, this pageant has participated in the discourse of how
regional culture is to be defined and how the events of the past
are to be remembered by the city as a collective. Moreover, the
pageant seeks to shape the perception of “El Paso” in
the minds of its audience in order to encourage feelings of unity,
optimism, and community spirit within a population of disparate
(and often discordant) social groups. In order to understand
better how the pageant functions as a community-building engine,
I will address the interaction between dramatic narrative, staging,
and theatrical space by drawing from several branches of scholarship
on space, place, and performance. Before beginning this analysis,
however, a little historical context for the historical pageant
is in order, as it is not widely known outside of Texas.
A Short
History of Viva! El Paso
Viva! El Paso is an outdoor drama that presents a cultural
history of El Paso, Texas. It was developed specifically for
performance
in the amphitheater at McKelligon Canyon, a park situated in
the mountains around which the city has developed. The production
is unusual among established U.S. outdoor dramas in two ways:
it is located at a venue inside the city limits, and the lion’s
share of its audience lives within the area depicted by the performance.
Consequently, it has the same general spectator base from year
to year, and its producers must frequently alter the content
of the show to entice the local community to return for performances
of multiple seasons. Viva! was created
specifically for the venue in which it plays annually, which
was itself the result of a
building project funded with the vision of creating a site in
the park dedicated to “hous[ing] a production that would
depict the history of this region” (Viva! 1983
program). 1. Thus, from the outset, the local government intended
both
the space and the production to play a role in articulating El
Paso’s identity. The project was overseen by the city Heritage
Committee. Prior to the construction of the space, committee
members visited other outdoor drama sites and consulted with
the Institute of Outdoor Drama for guidance on how to integrate
a historical pageant and accompanying venue into the city. The
committee then organized public funds, and built the stage using
labor provided by CETA (Comprehensive Employment and Training
Act, an initiative of Carter’s presidency). The project
demonstrated a political imperative as well as exemplifying the
government’s civic responsibility to promote arts and entertainment:
as Connorton articulates, “the question of the control
of ownership of information [is] a crucial political issue” (1).
The amphitheatre and production began, therefore, as a public
venture guided by a social engine with a vested interest in promoting
a particular image of El Paso and its history and in establishing
a specific role for the drama in the life of the city.
Actually, Viva! is the second production created for the space.
Its precursor was El Paso del Norte, a play that primarily addressed
the conflict between Spaniards and Native Americans in the region
at the time of the Conquest along with the uneasy union that
produced the Mestizo race. Created in the early 1970s by Teatro
de Los Pobres, a local Chicano theatre group, the show drew very
few spectators and lasted only two seasons, disappointing the
expectations of both the troupe and their sponsors. Former Viva!
artistic director Hector Serrano, an original member of Los Pobres,
describes this first show as dark and serious, intended to draw
attention to the vexed nature of both the discovery of the New
World and intercultural relations in the Americas as they played
out in the Paso del Norte. According to Serrano, public opinion
declared the show too depressing and tragic; audiences were not
interested in seeing the dark side of their regional history.
Still, the newly built stage needed a play. The amphitheater
was designed to house an historical pageant; the failure of El
Paso del Norte necessitated a re-thinking on the part of city
legislators and artistic collaborators.
City council member Polly Harris returned to Los Pobres, issuing
them “a challenge” to take the $20,000 of surplus
from producing del Norte and use it to try again, exhorting them
this time to create a show for the venue that would be “upbeat” and
help present a more positive vision of El Paso. This call for
a more celebratory performance reflects the social impulse that
Connorton outlines, in which power wielding elites “have
invented rituals that claim continuity with an appropriate historical
past, organizing ceremonies, parades and mass gathering, and
constructing new ritual spaces” (51). Though their first
attempt did not fit the bill as an appropriate vision of history
to fill the new “ritual space,” the committee offered
Los Pobres the chance to try again. In response, the group developed
a show loosely framed by the metaphor of the six flags of Texas,
representing the different nations and cultures that successively
laid claim to the region: Spanish, French, Mexican, Texas Republic,
Confederate, and US. It mixed musical numbers with dramatic sketches
and “primarily spotlighted the talents of individual cast
members” (Viva! 1983 program) in a variety-style format.
This was the birth of Viva! El Paso.
From their inception, the park and the play both demonstrate
Connorton’s insistence that “control of a society’s
memory largely conditions the hierarchy of power” (1),
through the active efforts of the city council and Heritage Committee
to determine the character of the story that the combination
would tell. This does not necessarily impugn the motives of the
local government in sponsoring the drama, nor does it condemn
Viva! as an instrument of hegemony per se; rather, the circumstances
of its birth demonstrate that a historical pageant may serve
ideological imperatives as well as amuse the spectator. Moreover,
the pedagogical aspects of these pageants – as repositories
of historical data – also actively work to mediate the
audience’s interpretation of that information, so that
a particular (desired) understanding of the community results.
In the twenty-five years of continued production that have followed
the rise of Viva! El Paso from the ashes of El Paso
del Norte,
the summer months in McKelligon Canyon have been largely occupied
by evening performances of the play. During the early seasons,
the show’s format of song-and-dance punctuated by short
dramatic sketches and tableaux developed and solidified into
the structure that it used for the last fifteen seasons. The “six
flags” device was maintained for years (it was finally
retired after 2002), and a presentation of all six flags was
made during the opening procession and finale each year. Over
time, the central focus has shifted to foregrounding images of
the different cultural groups that influenced El Paso’s
development – including Native American tribes, Conquistador
Spain, Mexico, US pioneer settlers, the Ft. Bliss military base,
and others. Featured cultural groups shift from year to year,
as do the musical numbers and short scenes. An individual element
might be created for a single year, or periodically “rotated” in
and out of the repertory. A particularly popular number or bit
might be maintained for multiple years, or brought out of retirement
by request from the public. Highlighting the virtuosity of individual
performers has become much less important than emphasizing the
historical and artistic contributions of each focus group to
the region’s combined culture, and promoting unity between
different groups of people living in the El Paso area – stressing
cooperation, shared heritage, and appreciation of each other’s
folkloric traditions.
In this manner, the production serves a community-building purpose.
In addition to song, dance, and sketch, the drama functions by
using the regional geography as a tool for teaching cultural
awareness and value. The construction of Viva! as a site-specific
dramatic narrative in McKelligon Canyon is a civic project of
unification and positive group identification. The remainder
of this analysis pays particular attention to the manipulation
of the physical place in which the performance occurs along with
the interpretation of geography and ideological space that aim
both to instruct the audience in the value of cooperation and
community spirit and to stimulate the emotions of cohesive regional
identity and cultural pride.
Remembering the Future, Building
the Past:
Surrogation and the Canyon
John Casey addresses what he calls a “process of platializing” in
his book The Fate of Place. He describes a growing trend towards
global “monoculture” in which technology, physical
mobility, and international social and economic exchange – especially
those dependent on Western/American economic and political paradigms – converge
to overwhelm traditional regional differences (xiii). Cities
fall prey to increasing uniformity of architectural structures
and commercial institutions; skyscrapers and McDonalds can be
found from Santiago, Chile to Kuala Lumpur. Economic exchange
makes it possible to access the same goods in multiple countries
while decreasing diversity among businesses from which to buy.
Electronic technology makes it possible to connect with individuals
across the planet while simultaneously permitting users to mask
or reconfigure their own identities into online persona. The
overall result of globalizing influences is to cultivate an overwhelming
sense of human anxiety regarding “placelessness,” or
the inability to forge identity based on a sense of local or
regional belonging. According to Casey:
[This anxiety] makes the human subject long for a diversity of
places, that is, difference-of-place that has been lost in a
worldwide monoculture . . .This is not just a matter of nostalgia.
An active desire for the particularity of place – for what
is truly “local” or “regional” – is
aroused by such increasingly common experiences. Place brings
with it the very elements sheared off in the planiformity of
site: identity, character, nuance, history. (xiii)
Historical pageants such as Viva! represent the effort of local
communities like El Paso to establish that desired particularity,
to give participants (including witnesses) the needed sense of
unique identity and belonging.
Glassberg also sees evidence of platializing in early twentieth-century
pageants, when increasing urbanization and industrialization
threatened traditional rural lifestyles: “Historical pageants
would revitalize rural towns by enabling local residents to catch
up with history by preserving a particular version of their traditions,
helping them to recognize outmoded practices while promoting
a unique local identity, sense of cohesion, and attachment to
place” (71). While contemporary pageants may worry less
about bringing their communities into step with progress, they
continue to evidence a preoccupation with civic pride and investment
in the community – Viva! included. In fostering that “attachment
to place,” the particulars of physical geography are an
important part of that process. McKelligon Canyon and its surrounding
parkland lie within El Paso city limits, only a few miles from
the downtown area. The location of the stage – outdoors
in the desert landscape and yet within the city proper – reflects
an effort to mediate urban homogenizing and isolating influences
described by Casey, problems that US theatre often reflects and
unintentionally reinforces.
Richard Shechner describes what he calls a performative schism
manifested in western theatrical performance. He addresses the
tendency of European and American drama to construct divisions
between performer and spectator and within the community, positing
that “[t]he history of the development of the western playhouse
has been to reposition an event that was largely open, outdoors,
and public into one that is closed, indoors, and private” (19).
Historical pageants like Viva! potentially and partially reverse
this process. The event occurs in an open air setting surrounded
by flora and fauna native to the region. Local authorities and
corporations encourage the public to attend through sponsorship
and advertising. The producers attempt to connect potential spectators
to the performance by informing them that, as members of the
community, they will be seeing their own history performed onstage.
As the program progresses, they are encouraged to participate
by clapping and singing along with familiar songs, offering enthusiastic
whoops and “ajua!” as appropriate. Performers exit
through the audience and remain at the back of the house to interact
with spectators after the event, pointedly thanking individual
attendees for their presence.
The combination of venue location, marketing aimed at creating
a sense of ownership in the drama on the part of consumers, and
performer availability during this “cool-down” period
(to use Schechner’s term) following the performance, create
closer associations between community members and the production
and help to strengthen the sense of community between performed,
performer, and spectator. Of course, the community must still
pay to attend, and man-made staging alters the environment where
the show occurs. Nevertheless, sponsorship by city government
and local merchants in addition to the fact that the drama is
staged on public parkland in a city-funded venue render this
historical pageant an example of theatre aimed at decreasing
this performative schism in the creation of an artistic event
(and subject matter) designated as shared community property.
However, Viva! El Paso simultaneously exists to carry out a government-sponsored
project of fostering among residents of the Paso del Norte region
a notion of shared local identity common to all, and has had
from its inception an ideologically loaded agenda in determining
the characteristics of that identity and promoting a specific
definition on what it means to be an “El Pasoan.”
Framing this ideological project are the canyon and its stage,
in which the show and its producers establish El Paso as both
physical place and cultural/historical space. The theatrical
and quasi-natural space of the canyon and amphitheatre becomes,
in a sense, the wider place “El Paso” for the duration
of the performance and serves as a venue for developing and transmitting
ideological information to the people there.
What Casey effectively describes as an epidemic of monoculture
sweeping across the globe has symptoms that appear acutely in
cities like El Paso. It is a border city that sits at the edge
of three states and two countries. A majority of the population
has some Hispanic heritage, and the blending of Anglo and Mexican
culture is almost as old as the settlement of the region; its
closeness to the Mexican border assures a constant stream of
immigrants from the Mexican interior. In earlier eras, many different
cultural groups migrated through the region on the route West;
members of these groups – European, Latino, African-American,
Asian – stayed and put down roots. The present economic
environment dominated by military and NAFTA industrial commerce,
however, imposes a more fluid population structure. While the
city population continues to be dominated by Chicanos and other
Hispanic peoples, a significant number of the current local inhabitants
come from many different places and backgrounds. The population
is relatively mobile and has a high rate of turnover as people
move in and out of the region (most for reasons of career and
military service). As in the past, newcomers bring and maintain
their own ethnic, class, and cultural identifications. In this
convoluted arena of so many fluctuating influences, further complicated
by homogenizing pressures of major industry, the city must forge
a viable identity.
The fluidity of border culture, combined with the problem of
monoculture fostered by corporations and trade, make it difficult
for both established community members and recent immigrants
to identify characteristics that would help give El Paso a unique
character and differentiate it from other cities or regions.
The process of creating a performative space where El Paso’s
regional story of history and culture could be played out reflects
this desire to differentiate and imbue the city with a distinctiveness
that denotes a sense of place. The use of the site, and the performance
constructed for it, carry out this project of creating a suitable
ideology, identity, and history for the city and its people.
For the producers of Viva! and the local government that supports
the show, it is vital that this project be one that generates
feelings of positive identification, pride, and goodwill between
community members.
To accomplish these goals requires a dual process of remembering
and forgetting, as certain parts of the Paso del Norte history
must be emphasized while others are suppressed, and still others
rewritten in order to celebrate the positive aspects of the regional
story while bringing the more painful, troubling moments of conflict
and discord into the service of the community-building endeavor.
In this sense, the production and the venue both become what
Joseph Roach terms “surrogations,” substitutions
that replace one thing or concept for another when the first
becomes unavailable. Often, the process entails overwriting unpleasant
or unusable aspects of the original (2).
The use of the McKelligon Canyon amphitheater aids in the bifurcated,
yet crucial, venture of remembering and forgetting in the production;
it becomes a surrogate for the original landscape in which the
events of El Paso’s past unfolded. The park, as it is used
in performance, stands in for the natural desert landscape of
the Southwest as it rapidly disappears under concrete as urbanization
expands in the region. Various onstage scenic structures represent
the early phases of urban development; the venue consists of
a hard stage floor and stadium-style seating facing one side
of the canyon. A part of the mountain forms the back wall of
the playing area. Walls of stone and mortar (reminiscent of the
building style used for early missions and forts in the area)
form a three-sided structure that encloses the playing space,
yet affords spectators a view of both the night sky and the high
canyon walls. Natural flora and strata surround the audience.
The offices of the producing organization, the El Paso Association
of the Performing Arts (EPAPA), reside against the adjoining
hillside. Looming canyon walls dwarf the multilevel gravel parking.
The surrounding terrain consists in sand, desert vegetation,
and a few wooden structures that shelter picnic tables. Observers
cannot see the city from the park (though they can see the ambient
glow of the city lights at night); the slope of the mountain
housing the theatre also conceals the urban sprawl wrapped around
the end of the Franklin Mountain chain.
The Image of “Home”:
Connecting the Physical Landscape
to Performer and Audience
Viva! performances from year to year are constructed to reflect
the importance of the natural environment, the geography of El
Paso, to the communal identity. The stage rests at the foot of
the canyon walls, with the backstage area on the bowl’s
sides and up its incline. Performers walk and ride horses down
the side of the canyon onto the stage, passing facades of conquest-era
mission buildings that rise from terrain closely resembling the
landscape of the actual locations. These factors integrate the
performers and spectators into the land, asking observers to
locate themselves with characters in the physical space. The
narrative draws parallels between character groups and contemporary
spectators as humans seeking to survive in the desert environment
and as witnesses to the history that has occurred on its soil.
Yearly performances affirm this in a number of ways: by 1) emphasizing
the need for water by all settling peoples and the nearness of
the Rio Grande river that attracted human colonization of the
small valley at the foot of the mountains; 2) highlighting the
importance of the area as a trade and travel route between Mexico,
the US, and the frontier; and 3) playing out significant moments
of contact between the peoples striving to survive in the area.
Though many historical episodes enacted will change between seasons,
the overall narrative attempts to foster group identity and regional
pride in the collective effort needed to build El Paso. Each
season’s production maintains the message that the existence
of the community in this unique place arises from of the interaction
between different social and ethnic groups living in the region
over time. It dramatically depicts power struggles between distinct
peoples, but configures them into encounters that facilitated
physical unions between the ancestors of many El Pasoans, who
met on this landscape. It asserts that the city built here has
grown through the combined efforts of all people living in and
around El Paso. In the logic of the performance narrative, current
El Pasoans co-exist in this space and can celebrate a common
heritage that includes diversity and cooperation, a commitment
to neighborliness and local growth, and a continuing commitment
to unity and the common good.
To achieve this end, the producers often rewrite history in ways
that belie the actual events, especially with regard to the presentation
of participants in important episodes. New, or at least reconfigured,
narratives, which spectators are encouraged to remember, work
to present a politically and socially charged image of El Paso.
One notable example of this reconfiguration is in the casting
of characters. The characters present in the performance space
from year to year do not necessarily depict accurately the people
that participated in the original events. Serrano typically practiced
colorblind casting for many roles, due to his conviction that
seeing as many ethnicities as possible represented by the bodies
on stage matters more than making sure that each segment is “authentically” presented
with regard to the time and group portrayed. Therefore, audiences
have seen African-American Spaniards, Anglo dancers in the Native
American sequence, and other examples of what might be called
ethnic anomalies. This practice has continued with subsequent
directors, after Serrano left both the show and the EPAPA organization.
This use of ahistorical casting to serve the ideological needs
of the present marks the action depicting the claiming of the
land by Spaniard Juan de Oñate, a scene that remains a
consistent feature of the program. Serrano frequently practiced
ethnic anomaly in his casting of this role as well. In this scene,
the actor playing Oñate rides onto the stage with his
entourage, including a retainer who carries the Spanish flag,
soldiers, and brown-robed priests. He recites a speech declaring
the land the property of Spain and stating their intention to
colonize it – to “civilize” it according to
their values by establishing trade routes, settlements, and missions
for Christianizing native peoples. Many of the lines spoken are
recovered from historical accounts written by monks and soldiers
who witnessed it. Serrano insists that the feel of the moment
matters more than historical accuracy:
He [Oñate] has been played by a Mexican-American, he has
been played by a Black-American, and he has been played by an
Anglo-American. None of them were correct ethnicities, you see,
but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I’m just
trying to say, “This is the character that claimed the
land you see, here he is. He’s wearing the helmet, he’s
carrying the flag of Spain, and he’s saying the words that
were actually spoken.”
The actor playing the Conquistador effectively surrogates the
real Juan de Oñate by speaking his words, appearing in
the scene carrying the symbols of Spanish conquest and standing
in surroundings close to the location of the original act of
taking possession. That Serrano chose in his directing to single
out a moment as historically significant while engaging in an
anachronistic casting choice reveals an important feature of
the pedagogical relationship between the performance and its
audience. The dramatic moment presents the event as foundational
to El Paso’s community identity, but in a way that delivers
a modern message of inclusiveness and ethnic harmony. By inserting
a modern Oñate into the pre-existing place of the event,
a new space of multicultural discourse appears in order to affirm
the official ideology established for El Paso by community leaders
and show producers, which promotes collective cohesion over individual
ethnic difference.
Shechner refers to these kinds of revisionist acts as “behavior
[that] offers to both individuals and groups the chance to re-become
what they once were – or even, and most often, to re-become
what they never were but wish to have been or wish to become” (38).
In this case, the desirous becoming is not so much an opportunity
for the actor to play at being a conquistador as an effort to
re-imagine the Conquest as something more (or other) than an
oppressive, brutal colonialism practiced by the Spanish. It works
to neutralize this negative interpretation of a key moment in
the regional past in much the same way that in Greek mythology
a rape can be romanticized into the auspicious conception of
a hero or god. The historical event has been reconfigured to
include room for many ethnicities, and altered to de-emphasize
(if not exclude) the subjugation of one ethnic group by another.
In this way, all can share in the telling of the collective history,
or at least in memories constructed for their unifying powers.
To be fair, Viva! producers have never attempted to bury some
of the grimmer aspects of the Conquest. Each year has featured
battles between Native Americans and Spaniards shortly before
the end of the first act. As stated earlier, the producers of
El Paso del Norte found that audiences felt acutely uncomfortable
with theatrical presentation of the more brutal parts of El Paso’s
past, especially those that too openly foregrounded racial conflict
(though the presentation of violence is not necessarily a problem.
In fact, on stage shootings remain a perennial favorite in the
Wild West sequence of the show.) For many seasons, dramatic depiction
of the conflict between Spaniards and Native Americans was not
entirely erased, but framed in such a way as to celebrate their
association while acknowledging the conflicts between them. At
the end of the first sequence, the performers stage a battle.
With an emphasis on melodramatic appeal and technical spectacle,
explosions and stage combat culminate in the tableaux of a Spanish
woman and a Native man mourning their respective losses in the
midst of many slain corpses. In certain seasons, each mourns
a lover from the enemy camp, in others, a loved one of their
own ethnic group.
This scene fades, yielding to one of the perennially popular
moments in the performance. Depicting the union of the Spaniard
and the Native American, the lights come up on the now corpse-free
stage. The narrator relates a general description of the conflict
between the two groups and its effect on the region. Two spotlights
depict a handsome Spanish male with sword drawn and a beautiful
Native female with chin raised and hands at her side; a third
soon highlights the Mexicano in his sombrero and serape, feet
planted wide apart and elbows out, announcing his presence with
an exuberant cry. The narrator summarizes:
The Indian and the Spaniard would have many battles, and in the
end the Indian would be defeated, but not destroyed. His religion
would become a mixture of paganism and Christianity, his blood
would mingle with Spanish blood to bring forth. . .the Mestizo,
a product of the Proud Indian and the aristocratic Spaniard.
(Viva! El Paso Promotional Video)
In most live performances over the years, the Spaniard and Native
American have posed standing amid the rocks and cacti of the
canyon above the stage, reasserting their connection with the
physical environment. The Mexicano stands at the base of the
canyon between them, closest to the concrete stage but still
connected to the earth at its edge. Thus, the event is not just
happening in the performance, it represents an exchange that
happened in the immediate geographical region and had an impact
on the contemporary inhabitants of the region who are now watching.
The audience response to this moment is often vocal and enthusiastic;
they greet the tableaux with applause and shouts. This was certainly
the case at each performance I attended over the years, and newspaper
reviews and articles frequently mention the scene and describe
audience reactions similar to the ones I experienced. The moment
transmits a particularly central message of affirmation to the
audience. As El Paso’s population has a Mexican-American
majority of more than 70%, the positioning of that heritage and
people in a celebratory light has special cultural value.
As Roach has said, “Memory is a process that depends crucially
on forgetting.” The violence of the Conquest must be forgotten,
or at least concealed, by focusing on the good that arises from
the bad situation. The events on stage turn a collective head
away from the circumstances of the union – native women
were often raped or taken as spoils of war to become concubines.
Like Greek mythology, the show chooses to replace the frequent
brutality of the original events with a vision that celebrates
the offspring instead of castigating the parents. For a community
whose membership contains a great deal of both bloodlines, this
is an important difference. The scene depicts the Mestizo, and
therefore the majority of its audience, as the vibrant, strong,
and colorful progeny of “proud” and “aristocratic” groups;
in the process, it minimizes (while not completely ignoring)
the more painful part of their identity that arises from being
the descendants of conquest and strife. In the process, it locates
all three in the natural environment, emphasizing that all belong
to the place El Paso and, therefore, contribute to the ideological
construct “El Paso.”
Viva! El Paso is a variety show with a message. Its intent is
to promote ideas about cultural celebration and collective unity
to the city’s inhabitants. The event occurs in a site that
was specially constructed for the dissemination of that message,
and as such serves as a space for discourse among El Pasoans,
a transmitter of officially sanctioned ideas. It also serves
as a representation of El Paso as a differentiated place, establishing
and upholding its uniqueness among places for the benefit of
an audience that lives within its dramatic and literal borders.
Acknowledgements
I would like to extend special thanks to Baylor’s Institute
for Oral History, which provided funding for research, and my
colleague Deanna Toten Beard who read several drafts of this
paper and provided invaluable counsel.
Notes
1. I am grateful to the EPAPA offices for providing
me with souvenir programs
for more than a decade’s worth of performances. Informational materials
in the programs has tended to repeat itself from year to year; I, consequently,
chose to cite the first year in which the information appears, when I reference
these programs.
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