Carpa y teatro, sol y sombra: show business and public culture in San Antonio's Mexican colony, 1900-1940

This project describes and analyzes the theatrical life of the ethnic Mexican colony in San Antonio, Texas, during the first half of the twentieth century, both as a historical phenomenon and as the object of public historical discourse. The study focuses the commercial musical comedy, vaudeville, and circus-like entertainments that are usually referred to as popular theater and the non-profit politically-oriented performance of Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s that claimed the earlier theater as a precursor. Key sources include fifty oral interviews with twenty former participants in that theatrical life, sound recordings of comic dialogues and sketches made by performers during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, newspaper sources, the business records of a tent show called the Carpa Cubana, a set of manuscripts used by another tent show, the Carpa Monsiváis, and photographic records of several interviewees. The project argues that theatrical entertainment was a key part of a set of interlocking public discursive institutions through which ethnic Mexicans formed themselves into a community in San Antonio and southern Texas. In particular, the theater offered a space in which ethnic Mexicans symbolically reflected on the contradictions involved in their processes of community formation, resisted their socially subordinate position in a modernizing Texas, and created an image of themselves directed at the encompassing Anglo-dominated social order. This study surveys the typology of theatrical space in San Antonio’s Mexican colony, showing how the distinction between carpa (“tent show”) and teatro (“theater”) symbolized class divisions in the colony and led to status distinctions among performers. It also examines thematic material from various theatrical entertainments, examining the ways in which a gendered sense of Mexican identity was articulated in the theater through stock character types, the mixing of English and Spanish, and the ironic juxtaposition of incongruous generic frameworks. Finally, the study details the politics of history in which the earlier popular theater is embedded today, examining the heritage discourse of the Chicano Movement and the autobiographical discourse of a comedian who was active with his family’s tent show in San Antonio.