In From Scenarios to Networks: Performing the Intercultural in Colonial Mexico, Leo Cabranes-Grant analyzes three historical moments from the period of the Viceroyalty of New Spain during the sixteenth century and one liturgical play written in the seventeenth century. Through this analysis the author describes how the process of making or doing things—which is his approach to “poiesis” (3)—created, and simultaneously dismantled, a multilayered society in which native traditions and European practices had to coexist. Cabranes-Grant's interpretation of Bruno Latour's actor-network theory is central to his study of a colonial society in constant transformation as well as of the relationship among people, objects, and spaces.

In the first chapter, the author concentrates on the 1566 performance of the masquerade offered by the Ávila brothers in honor of Martín Cortés, son and heir of Hernán Cortés, who along with other criollos, led a movement to prevent the abolition of encomiendas—a system in which natives were conscripted to work for a Spaniard as a reward for the latter's deeds during the conquest of the New World (a right inherited by their descendants)—and was accused of conspiring to become king of New Spain. The masquerade presents the opportunity to study intercultural performances in a scenario in which the encomenderos (Spaniards or their descendants granted encomiendas) dressed and masked themselves as Aztecs performing a dance, more than likely a “mitote based on the first encounter between Emperor Motezuma and Hernán Cortés” (45). The author analyzes the theatricality of this event by taking into account the material objects that accompanied the performance, such as pottery, feathers, and flowers, in an act that was not only a reinterpretation of Don Martín's father's glorious past but also a demonstration of the encomendero’s wealth.

The second chapter is an analysis of the Jesuits’ festival of bones that took place in 1578 when the newly arrived Jesuits were trying to strengthen their presence in Mexico. The festival—a communal effort with a combination of European and native elements, accompanied by poetry, sermons, processions, and literary competitions that included native dancers, singers, and musicians—made also possible a performance of the sufferings and triumph of early Christian martyrs as represented in the dramatic text Triumpho de los Santos. The play, believed to be written for that occasion by “two professors of rhetoric and Latin from the Colegio de San Pedro y San Pablo” (66), depicted the martyrs’ predicaments in a manner that resembled the efforts to convert the natives to Catholicism. The author's examination of the festival contributes to an understanding of performance in an intercultural setting, in which not only were European traditions adapted in order to promote the New World's religious transformation, but also native elements were present as well, such as the Christian version of a macehualiztli, a “song[ ] dedicated to the gods” (74), the text of which the author includes in this section.

The third chapter is centered on the Mexican drums depicted in the Cantares mexicanos and in the political alliance brought about by an indigenous wedding. Cabranes-Grant studies ways in which the instruments possessed the “quasi-qualities of mediators,” in the sense that they had the power to transport people through time and space (111). By seeing Mexican drums as “translocators,” whose function “was to make boundaries available, to reactualize and restart the narratives and the scenarios of collective networking” (111), the author demonstrates the different levels of cultural representation that drums offered. Thus, the wedding guests who danced around a drum not only attended the political union of the cities Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco but also witnessed the transformation of their marriage practices, from polygamy to monogamy, in order to conform to Catholic standards. The importance of maintaining native traditions through drumming, dancing, and singing in a fast-changing society is also present in the examples extracted from the Cantares mexicanos that the author incorporates here, in which he highlights the malleability of the song-dances while at the same time recounting that the past also had the power to bring itself into the present.

The last chapter focuses on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's El divino Narciso (1690), which is an auto sacramental centered on the finezas (acts of love offered as gifts) of Christ, specifically the Eucharist. Through the Mexican nun's introduction of the indigenous dance tocotín into the play, Cabranes-Grant illustrates how she “places herself at the intersection between geography and epistemology” (122), while at the same time presenting the transition from native rituals honoring the Aztec god to the joy that both the natives and Europeans felt upon accepting the Christian god.

Cabranes-Grant, consistent with his idea that “closures are transformative transactions” (141), refuses to call the last section of the book a conclusion, arguing that—like the circulatory networks comprising people, masquerades, relics, drums, song, dances, literary works, and more that he has presented—his book, once it has been read, will become part of the reader's own process of becoming. Cabranes-Grant's approach to the past through performance is an innovative way to understand political, economic, and social problems, as well as religious transformations, in an intercultural and changing society. The events and plays analyzed throughout this book are enriched by a thoughtful interdisciplinary dialogue between performance studies theories and Latin American studies critique, revealing a process of identity (trans)formation that is never complete but rather in constant movement.