Staging race in latina/o and Mexican transborder theater

This dissertation addresses the issue of race in regard to the Mexican immigrant in both Latino and Mexican theater and performance. The introduction, Chapter 1, defines race as biological differentiations that are reiterated through historical understandings in both Mexico and the United States. In the United States, the history of race is based on colonial encounters and issues of slavery, among other factors. In Mexico, racial concepts were influenced by a process of cultural mestizaje that tended to incorporate indigenous elements into the modernizing project of Mexico, and resulted in a movement toward the whitening of the race. Chapter 2 discusses role playing in regard to the construction of racial identities in Milcha Sánchez-Scott's Latina and Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda's La mujer que cayó del cielo. I question racial categorization in terms of globalization and transnational markets in Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante's Stuff and Luis Valdez's Los vendidos in Chapter 3. The concept of 'nation' and national identity for Mexican immigrants, and how their racialized bodies challenge conceptualizations of an essentialist nation-popular is explored in Hugo Salcedo's El viaje de los cantores and Cherríe Moraga's Watsonville: Some Place not Here in Chapter 4. The characters in each play of this study must confront their biological differences and learn to classify their Latino identity in order to confront the binary black and white racial standards of the United States as well as the process of mestizaje in Mexico. In order to negotiate a definition of the term race that is not based on bipolarities, the concept of a posthegemonic race is introduced. This term proposes an ideology of race based on performances that challenge an historical duality of hegemonic and counterhegemonic racial identities that are determined primarily by skin color. This study concludes that posthegemonic races are classified according to individual performances and, as such, skin color is no longer the primary determining factor in racial classifications. In the Conclusion, Chapter 5, the issue of choice is reiterated as a challenge to immigrants that remains to be questioned in regard to race in both Mexico and the United States