This book, as the author herself states (191), is not an ethnography of a dance, but rather a historical analysis of the representational strategies of two types of performance associated with the P'urhépecha people of Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán, Mexico. Both the Night of the Dead (Noche de Muertos, an all-night cemetery vigil now accompanied by a music/dance festival and other touristic activities) and the Dance of the Old Men (Danza de los Viejitos, a comic masked dance featuring percussive footwork or zapateo) have become iconic embodiments of Mexican-ness, particularly through their respective central figures: the kneeling woman and the masked old man.Footnote 1 Author Ruth Hellier-Tinoco focuses not on their movements, music, or other formal characteristics, but rather on their relation to nationalist and touristic constructions of folklore and indigenousness beginning in the post-revolutionary 1920s. And instead of constructing an ethnography of her own, she analyzes others' ethnographic interpretations.
The book is divided into three sections. The first is an overview, the second a history, and the third analyzes reception, embodiment, and visual imagery. Running through the three sections is the theme of ideologies of performance, or as Hellier-Tinoco terms the concept, “performism.” She defines this neologism as the “all-encompassing agendas, strategies, practices, and processes that entailed constructing and shaping concepts of peoples, bodies, activities, and places through display and reproduction” (240), and states that her goal is to examine the strategies of nationalist and tourist performism through the Old Men and Night of the Dead, using interdisciplinary methodologies to analyze the interactions of art, institutions, and people (27).
The book's main topic and contribution is thus the correlation of nationalist and tourist performance practices, discourses, and strategies. Hellier-Tinoco aptly points out that these twin contexts have similar needs and employ similar processes of essentialization. Specifically, Viejitos and Muertos performances contributed to romantic nationalism by representing an indigenousness linked to concepts of rurality and tradition, thus creating powerful icons of an “authentic” and unique national identity. Such representations are particularly important in Mexico because of the state's desire to reduce its heterogeneous nature to a single, unified one.Footnote 2 The first chapter accordingly presents initial descriptions of both to show how they are used to embody the essences of Michoacán or of Mexico. The second chapter briefly discusses familiar social science concepts of nationalism, ethnicity, identity, tourism, performance, embodiment, and hegemony, each in a one- to two-page section. While this chapter offers little that is new to scholars, it may nonetheless be useful to students.
Chapters 3–9 present a history of the two performances' trajectories over the twentieth century. This section presents many intriguing anecdotes and avenues of inquiry, but they can often be difficult to uncover in the sea of details and “snapshots” of historical figures, performances, and theories. For instance, parts of Chapter 3 on the colonial and revolutionary periods will be review for those familiar with Mexico; more useful are the discussions of a key magazine (Mexican Folkways) and two exhibitions that come at the end of the chapter. Though brief, they provide new information on how intellectuals and state institutions used performances like these to develop tourism and promote nationalism.
Chapter 4 focuses on the individuals involved in appropriating and displaying these events in the 1920s. At this time, a group of four influential intellectuals, including anthropologist Manuel Gamio, traveled to the Pátzcuaro region on a collecting mission, resulting in the dissemination of images and descriptions. Perhaps more important, key musicians such as the Bartolo Juárez family were brought to Mexico City to teach the dance and music. Intriguingly, while the Juárezes were literate musician/composers who also played European classical and dance music, they were depicted as “natural” musicians in order to better fit with the state's master narrative of indigenous purity.
In Chapter 5, the author shows how the touristic development of Lake Pátzcuaro correlated with policies of integration, implemented partly through cultural missions (state-run regional educational institutions), which also aided in fixing the Viejitos choreography through organized contests and printed pedagogical descriptions. While assimilationism and indigenism might seem contradictory ideologies, they appeared together in the 1930s. Both served particular needs of the state: the first, modernization, and the second, identity-building. The two Mexico City staged performances described in Chapter 6 exemplify this pairing. Both again involved Bartolo Juárez; both aimed to show the state as a benevolent guardian.
Chapter 7 brings the discussion from 1940 up to the key moment of the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. During this Mexican “golden age,” numerous institutions were created to continue the assimilationist mission and the consolidation of the official repertoire of Mexican dance. Concurrently, the Viejitos acquired exchange value as tourism to Pátzcuaro grew, to the point that a Festival of Music and Dance was inaugurated in 1964 to provide entertainment for the overflow crowds at the Noche de Muertos. Through the Viejitos' performance in such contexts, a new style began to emerge that emphasized speed, exaggeration, and precision.
As Hellier-Tinoco explains in Chapter 8, one response to the state's 1968 massacre of student protesters was a return to populism and folkloric nationalism, morphing into multiculturalism in the 1980s. It resulted in yet more state-sponsored performances by P'urhépecha as well as further use of the dance by professional folklórico companies. Yet the increased visibility of the dance only made economic disparities more obvious: while the latter were paid adequately, the former seldom earned anything at all. Chapter 9 further explores the dissemination of the dance and associated imagery worldwide through a series of paragraph-long “snapshots” describing various concerts and tours.
Chapter 10, the last in part 2, is the strongest—perhaps unexpectedly, since the author's dissertation focused on the earlier period. Here, Hellier-Tinoco shows how P'urhépechas have reappropriated the touristic versions of their dances even as they maintain the dance in more “traditional” ritual contexts. Focusing on the P'urhépecha Artistic Festival in the village of Zacán, which began as a local affair in the 1970s but has since become an international spectacle, the author argues that state-sponsored indigenismo has been important for indigenous self-determination. In a few pages at the end of the chapter, Hellier-Tinoco briefly explains her role in the field as a performer of P'urhépecha music. Although she expresses discomfort at focusing too much on herself, further reflection on and discussion of her experiences would nonetheless have been a welcome addition to the book, both to better explain her own position and to enrich her narrative.
Turning from historiography to cultural theory, the first chapter of Part 3 takes reception, interpretation, and embodiment as its central themes. Hellier-Tinoco argues that the bodies displayed in the two performances portray an indigenous, rural, authentic Mexico and are interpreted similarly even in different contexts because of the consistency of framing and historical contextualization since the postrevolutionary period. The strategies used to “authenticate” P'urhépecha people as indigenous have been similarly consistent over time, focusing on appearance, cultural and occupational practices, continuity with pre-Hispanic cultures, and location, all of which play a role in both the advertising and actual performance of Night of the Dead and the Old Men. In both, costume and movement are important signifiers of indigeneity and are linked with gender. For instance, the men on display in the Viejitos use fast, strong, rhythmic, and virtuosic movements, while the women in the Noche de Muertos use slow, flowing, simple, and unskilled or everyday movements.
Chapter 12 turns to an analysis of representations of the two performances (many already described in previous chapters). These include postcards, a 2006 European ad campaign, and a real-time film exhibit of the Night of the Dead at the 2000 World's Fair in Hanover, Germany. With these examples, the author aims to show continuity, as the same sorts of images and strategies have been used since the early postrevolutionary era—particularly those that insist on always locating indigenous people in the past. For example, the World's Fair “living diorama” shows only silent women in the cemetery, with neither the men nor the many hundreds of tourists entering the frame.
The final chapter, barring a short epilogue, looks at the lasting results of essentialization, folklorization, and economic production. These include the creation of a set of Mexican dances meant to represent a whole country on the international stage, or a whole way of life when presenting P'urhépecha on domestic stages. Meanwhile, in a context of increasing out-migration, tourist presentations actually have positive effects for the performers, who feel their culture affirmed. More problematic is the fact that professionalism is deemed incompatible with indigeneity, resulting in many P'urhépecha being unable to earn money for their performances. Perhaps for this reason, one musician insisted, “Our music isn't folklore,” (245) but this intriguing comment needed to be further unpacked in the chapter.
Embodying Mexico does a good job in bringing out the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in Mexican cultural production. It also points the way to avenues for future research. For instance, the Night of the Dead was given UNESCO status as a Masterpiece of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2003. What effects, if any, has this designation had on the performance and performers? Hellier-Tinoco's work on the Bartolo Juárez family or on key publications such as Mexican Folkways could also easily be expanded into articles in themselves.
The book also has a few weaknesses. First, while the “snapshot” structure of the book (explicit only in Chapter 9 but present throughout) into short segments does allow for presentation of multiple interrelated themes, it also inhibits deeper description or analysis of any particular topic. And while the author explicitly states that she chooses not to tie up loose ends because the situation described is not neat and tidy, this ultimately means that the book does not significantly revise earlier theorists' writings on similar topics. Néstor García Canclini's work on tourism and folklore in Michoacán thus remains the definitive theoretical source, even though he did not deal with music and dance (Canclini Reference Canclini and Lozano1993). Second, and surprisingly for a book from Oxford University Press, this work suffers from distractingly poor editing, with numerous punctuation, accentuation, and capitalization errors, as well as a bothersome use of passive voice.
Third, while the author has significant experience performing the music discussed, description and analysis of music and dance practice is confined to a four-page appendix, allowing for no more than a cursory explanation of body position, steps, figures, instrumentation, and musical structure. The visceral experience of sound and movement, which might have been conveyed through ethnographic description of the performances in situ (whether on stage or in more intimate contexts), is thus curiously missing from this work on embodiment. This omission may make the book of less interest to dance scholars.
The book's accompanying Web site compensates for some of these problems. Hellier-Tinoco's choice to put 48 clips from her field recordings online is commendable, and these videos are a vital addition for readers unfamiliar with the practices described in the book. Other authors would do well to emulate this idea and take similar advantage of technology.
