Spectacles of Relation: Race, Performance, and the Latinx Nineteenth Century

Christofer Rodelo
Chicano/Latino Studies
UC Irvine

My book manuscript argues that the nineteenth-century performing body has profoundly shaped Latinx racial identity. I show that historical performances of what I call “spectacles of relation,” displays of Latinx subjects as represented in theatre, literature, and popular culture, constructed a Latinx body politic representative of different racial formations. I use deep archival research and close textual analysis to trace how these spectacles constructed a burgeoning idea of Latinidad through the confluence of Anglo-American assumptions of who constituted a Latinx subject and the performers’ use of their body to uphold or contradict these expectations. My case studies range from freak show acts and blackface minstrels to playwrights and orators. Through reconstituting these performance histories, I argue that the spectacular body has been a key arbiter of the privileging of whiteness within Latinidad. I also reconstruct a performance genealogy that centers Black and Indigenous subjects as crucial actors in Latinx history. By developing a relational history of Latinx performance practices, I make significant interventions in theatre and performance studies, critical race studies, and American literary and cultural history.