Espacio y tiempo de fiesta en Nueva España (1665-1760) by Judith Farré Vidal (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Espacio y tiempo de fiesta en Nueva España (1665-1760) by Judith Farré Vidal Ben Post Farré Vidal, Judith. Espacio y tiempo de fiesta en Nueva España (1665-1760). Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2013: 311p. This study makes a valuable contribution to the field of colonial-era performance studies, thanks to its detailed analysis of individual fiestas, attention to the print history surrounding festive time, and recognition of the continuities between late Hapsburg and early Bourbon rule in Mexico. Farré Vidal resists the temptation to treat the momentous deaths at the end of the 17th Century (sor Juana, Sigüenza y Góngora, and Carlos II, last of the Spanish Hapsburgs) as a vast rupture in the cultural history of Mexico; instead, she presents the reader with a portrait of a theatricalized urban space that, in the 17th Century as well as the 18th, served to promote imperial power, criollo consciousness, and a sense of social cohesion. The book’s first half provides a framework for understanding these performances. Chapter One, which describes the social motivations for Novohispanic processions, moves beyond Maravall’s view of Early Modern mass culture as essentially propagandistic. The fiesta serves not only as a form of social control, but also as a search for novelty, display of conspicuous consumption, channel for public dissent, and expression of a sense of belonging to the creole patria. Chapter Two treats the role of Amerindians in the staging of these celebrations and contrasts the idealizing and mystifying tendencies of Mexico City, where criollo students dressed as indios and Sigüenza y Góngora used Aztec monarchs as models for the incoming viceroy, with celebrations in Oaxaca in which Amerindians participated more directly. After these chapters dedicated to social function and social reality, Chapter Three turns to the textual afterlife of the fiesta. Print accounts of these performances, Farré Vidal explains, create a kind of omniscient perspective on the fiesta in question, allowing intellectual elites to experience again and again events they may have witnessed only partially. [End Page 211] In the four chapters of the book’s second half, the reader encounters four different classes of performance: occasional processions (for the canonization of a saint or the death of a monarch) in Chapter Four, viceregal triumphal entrances in Chapter Five, burlesque university celebrations in Chapter Six, and convent theatre in Chapter Seven. The latter two chapters aim to show the public nature of such spectacles: Chapter Six brings university celebrations out into the city streets, while Chapter Seven reveals the convent walls to be quite porous at performance time. Each of these chapters, packed with examples from Farré Vidal’s copious research, culminates with a new edition of a performance-related text (whether post-fiesta descriptive poems in the first three chapters, or, in Chapter Seven, the text of a sainete performed for the visiting viceroy and virreine). Some of these texts have never appeared in modern editions; all are copiously annotated and help reveal the fashion in which Mexican performances echoed on in artful and complex written accounts. Of special interest is the 1680 Pierica narración, an account of the entrance of the marqués de la Laguna that describes the triumphal arches constructed by sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora. Espacio y tiempo de fiesta en Nueva España concludes with a 53-page glosario that draws on Antonio de Robles’ multi-decade Diario de sucesos notables and several prose texts that describe performances—ten entradas by viceroys and archbishops, two processions in honor of Santa Rosa de Lima’s beatification, a Jesuit celebration of San Francisco de Borja’s canonization, and a máscara by Sigüenza y Góngora. From these (mostly 17th-Century) sources, Farré Vidal identifies common performance techniques, locations, and themes, providing full citations and examples of each term. This account of several decades worth of arcos, carros, gigantones, toros, and volatines, to mention only a few of the entries, reinforces the author’s concern with the continuities of Mexican performances in this time period. [End Page 212] Ben Post University of Wisconsin, Madison Copyright © 2015 The Center of Latin American Studies