Manuel E. Cuellar's Choregraphing Mexico is a long-overdue critical study of Mexican traditional and regional dance known today as folklórico. Scholars have often dismissed folklórico as a noncritical and reductionist commodity of Mexican nationalism. Thankfully, Cuellar ends such indifference through his fascinating and well-researched volume and invites readers to see folklórico ‘as a meaningful public cultural discourse’ (p. xiii). Writing from his unique experience as a dancer, choreographer and scholar, Cuellar offers a window to see folklórico dance as a contested cultural formulation that has been central to the creation of Mexicanness within Mexico and the Mexican diaspora. Cuellar proves that Mexican regional dance is a social embodiment that at times reproduces nationalistic tropes and at others critiques them. Choreographing Mexico is a rich exploration of how bodies in motion create and recreate the idea of a nation.
Spanning from the late Porfirian regime to the postrevolutionary era (1910–40), Choreographing Mexico is comprised of four chapters and an introduction. Cuellar's experience as a folklórico dancer for 30 years is central to his methodological mode of inquiry. Engaging with performance scholars like Diana Taylor, who questions Eurocentric assumptions that knowledge is transferred only by the written archive, Cuellar uses embodied knowledge as his methodological framework. He queers the archive – or reinterprets it from an anti-heteronormal perspective – by using social corporeality as his mode of inquiry, one that has been excluded from studies about Mexican nationalism. The body becomes the archive and the means of archiving (p. 27). The volume shows how productive a study of Mexican cultural formulations is when taking into consideration intellectual, personal and affective connections with the archive. Choreographing Mexico's contribution is two-fold: it legitimises folklórico as an object of study and expands what constitutes evidence of Mexicanness.
Cuellar lays out an engaging genealogy of influential performances about moving bodies in festivals, celebrations, film and theatre. He questions the dominant discourse of Mexicanness as the embodiment of a mestizo masculinity and instead highlights nuanced formulations of Indigenous, female and Black. Through his careful examination of writings, photographs, choreographies and films he demonstrates that folklórico dance systematises national subjects through movement and their awareness of it (kinaesthesia). But it is precisely because of bodies’ subjectivities that their total normalisation is impossible.
The book's first chapter, ‘Rehearsals of Cosmopolitan Modernity’, analyses the Porfirian Centennial Celebrations of Mexican Independence of 1910 as a performance of exotic cosmopolitanism for elite national and international audiences. Cuellar distils how the Centennial's Desfile histórico was not just a visual representation of nationalism but a kinaesthetic undertaking of nationals to recognise themselves corporeally within a grand historical narrative. Thanks to footage of the Desfile histórico restored by the Filmoteca Nacional, Cuellar reveals how the Porfirian official narrative did not seek to integrate Indigenous communities but to use them as living historical props. Mexico's contradiction between the representation of a glorified Indigenous past and the discrimination of an Indigenous present emerges through Cuellar's detailed analysis. For example, the Desfile's footage shows Indigenous workers struggling to get a glimpse of their own romanticised past while standing way behind the comfortably seated ruling classes. Porfirio Díaz promoted Indigenous difference not only through discourse but also kinaesthetically.
Chapter 2, ‘La Noche Mexicana and the Staging of Festive Mexico’, looks at the massive 1921 fiesta celebration that took place in Mexico City's Chapultepec Park during the last week of September. It was the first of such celebrations after the 1910 revolutionary war. La Noche Mexicana enacted an embodied sociality of the popular mestizo – a racial construct that promoted Indigenous acculturation and assimilation. Dances by Chinas Poblanas (national stereotypes of an Indian princess figure) and Tehuanas (women from the isthmus of Tehuantepec, Oaxaca), an eruption of a replica of the Popocatépetl volcano, a light show in Chapultepec's forest, fireworks and songs were among the various shows performed around the park's lake. Cuellar renders this spectacle as a hybrid amalgam of performative traditions that materialised a postrevolutionary Mexico as popular, festive and educational.
Chapter 3, ‘Nellie Campobello’, is the heart of the book. It centres on Campobello's foundational role in the institutionalisation of dance in Mexico as a pedagogical enterprise and as a field of knowledge production. Cuellar contextualises Campobello's legacy with her dance career and her choreographies created for a national audience. It is certainly appalling how, despite Campobello's influential role as choreographer and director for more than 40 years of Mexico's National School of Dance (1937–83), there is a dearth of English-language scholarly investigations into Campobello's work in shaping Mexican dance. Nellie Campobello developed dance as an educational practice for the public to consume Mexico's racial, ethnic and sexual diversity. The chapter features Campobello's performance of El jarabe tapatío, her mass choreography El ballet 30–30 (1931) and her book Ritmos indígenas de México (1940). The reader will encounter wonderful insights such as the contrast between Anna Pavlova's balletic interpretation of El jarabe tapatío, and the Campobello sisters’ reclaiming of this traditional dance as a national symbol. Wearing huaraches instead of ballet shoes and dressed as the iconic Mexican couple of ‘El charro’ (a traditional Mexican horseman) and ‘La china poblana’, Nellie and Gloria Campobello infused El jarabe with a new nationalistic aesthetic value.
In Chapter 4, ‘Cinematic Renditions of a Dancing Mexico’, the book turns to folklórico dance in Mexican film during its golden age in the 1930s and 1940s. Cuellar argues that dancing bodies in Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Que viva México! (1932), Fernando de Fuentes's Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936) and Raúl de Anda's La reina del trópico (1946) undid the official homogeneity of a mestizo nation and advanced the circulation of images of a festive Mexico. For example, the author unpacks La bamba – Mexico's iconic dance with Afro-mestizo roots – in de Anda's film as an ambivalent, contradictory and slippery kinaesthetic imaginary of Mexico's ethno-racial diversity. Cuellar presents absorbing descriptions of Eisenstein's experimental filming techniques in the famous celebration of the Day of the Dead depicted in the epilogue of ¡Que viva México! Readers will want to watch Eisenstein's emblematic film and experience its mythic and sensorial impressions.
In the volume's final chapter, ‘Queering Mexico's Archive’, Cuellar goes back to his positionality as a dancer and his affective investments to the archive to discuss the critical role of folklórico within the Mexican diaspora. He includes a fascinating description of the Punjabi–Mexican dancing community in California and its 2015 staging of Half and Halves, a dance exploration by the Duniya Dance and Drum Company and Ensambles Ballet Folklórico de San Francisco. Traditional dance within the Mexican diaspora could have been explored in more detail, as in the author's discussion of Punjabi bhangra and folklórico dancers setting in motion ‘intercultural dialogue and strategic solidarities’ (p. 227). Cuellar provides the grounds for future explorations of social embodiments in the Americas through his closing gesture towards performance ethnography.
Choreographing Mexico offers a welcome and new interdisciplinary look at folklórico dance as essential to Mexican cultural formations. The volume will be important for Mexicanists and scholars of dance and performance. Accessible to multiple audiences, Choreographing Mexico is for anyone interested in Mexican culture and anything Mexican.
