Copyright by Peter Clair Haney 2004 The Dissertation Committee for Peter Clair Haney Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: CARPA Y TEATRO, SOL Y SOMBRA Show Business and Public Culture in San Antonio’s Mexican Colony, 1900-1940 Committee: Richard R. Flores, Supervisor Deborah Kapchan José Limón Joel Sherzer Kathleen Stewart CARPA Y TEATRO, SOL Y SOMBRA Show Business and Public Culture in San Antonio’s Mexican Colony, 1900-1940 by Peter Clair Haney, M.A., B.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2004 Dedication To the memories of Raúl Almaguer, Lalo Astol, Raymundo García, Carlos Monsiváis, Amada Navarro de Monsiváis, and Enrique Valero, all of who made invaluable contributions to this study and did not live to see its completion Acknowledgements This project began fourteen years ago this June, and during that time, I have benefited from the assistance of many people. This dissertation would not have been possible without the financial support of Grinnell College’s Rosenfield Program in Public Affairs, International Relations, and Human Rights, the University of Texas at Austin, the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project at the University of Houston, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the Rockefeller Foundation through the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center’s Gateways Humanities Fellowship Program. My parents, Bernard and Carlena Haney, also provided significant financial and moral support during some of the leanest years of my graduate study and deserve special thanks. Of course, all the financial support in the world would not have made a research project had it not been for the willingness of a number of remarkable individuals to share their stories and memories with me. Raúl Almaguer, Marieta Batilla, Rosita Fernández, Leonardo García Astol, Rodolfo García, Esther Robinson, Raymundo and Virginia García, Ramiro González-González, Leandra Aguirre de González, Jesusa “Susie” Mijares, Carlos Monsiváis, Amada Monsiváis, Normalinda Monsiváis, Domingo Monsiváis, Herminia Monsiváis, Rolando Morales Mimi Reyes, Enrique Valero, Aurora Valero, Amparo Webber, and Walter Webber all received me in their homes with v exemplary hospitality and I can only hope that this dissertation conveys something of their depth, wit, and eloquence. Rodolfo García in particular spent considerable time with me on the project, and I will miss the camaraderie of our afternoon meals at the Luby’s in Las Palmas Mall. Several relatives of my consultants also assisted in the research process. To Frank García, Rodolfo García Jr., and Ricardo Medina, I owe special thanks. Over the years I have benefited greatly from the guidance of Richard Flores, my dissertation director, as well as that of the members of my committee, Deborah Kapchan, José Limón, Joel Sherzer, and Kathleen Stewart. These individuals have provided me with invaluable insights and encouragement in and out of class, and I cannot express my gratitude to them enough. Other members of the faculty at the University of Texas at Austin also provided advice and support, including Elizabeth Keating, James Nicolopolous, Manuel Peña, Pauline Turner Strong, Keith Walters, and Tony Woodbury. A special word of thanks is due to Elizabeth C. Ramírez and Pablo Miguel Martínez for their careful proofreading of an earlier version of Chapter Five, which I submitted to the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center as fellow in 2000, and to Marcia Stephenson, Jim McNutt, and Jerry Poyo, who mentored me through my initial research in 1990. Thanks are also due to the editors of The Journal of American Folklore, Pragmatics, and The Journal of Linguistic Anthropology and to anonymous reviewers associated with those publications, who provided invaluable comments on earlier versions of Chapters Six, Three, and Five, respectively. At conferences and similar scholarly venues, I have enjoyed useful input and encouragement from Richard Bauman, Mary Bucholtz, Antonia Castañeda, Kenya Dworkin y Méndez, Jorge Huerta, Alexandra Jaffe, Nicolás Kanellos, Arturo Madrid, Norma Mendoza-Denton, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, Deborah Paredez, Jack Sidnell, Erik Lee Skjön, and Valentina Pagliai. Finally, my fellow graduate students at vi the University of Texas at Austin have been, in many ways, my best teachers and mentors. Ben Chappell, Maribel García, Miguel Gómez, Anne-Marie Guerra, Sandya Hewamanne, Joel Huerta, Anne Johnson, Chris Labuski, Hari Kanta Ogren, Virginia Raymond, David Samuels, Chantal Tetreault, Mike Trujillo, the members of the 1999 Advanced Seminar for Chicano Research, the members of the 1998-1999 editorial board of Text, Practice, Performance, and the members of the 1994-1997 Sociolinguistics and Linguistic Anthropology Group (SLAG), all deserve thanks for their support and for their comments on various incarnations of my work. This project also owes much of its richness to the assistance of various archivists and cultural workers who have provided me with research assistance, leads, and support over the yeas. Jorge Piña, formerly of the Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center helped me get on the right track in research and helped me in ways I may never fully appreciate. José Manuel Galván Leguízamo provided me with access to his own interviews and copies of his own unpublished manuscripts as well as serving as an able and effective field assistant during my 1997 research. Karina Galindo provided diligent and cheerful administrative support for me during my Gateways fellowship, and I thank her and all the other folks at the Guadalupe for treating me like familia. Warm thanks are due to Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records, who generously provided me with access to the Arhoolie Foundation’s collection of Mexican American music and expressed genuine interest in and enthusiasm for my translations of some of those recordings (cf. www.arhoolie.com for information about the foundation). Stephen Davidson of UCLA’s online “Frontera” archive also deserves a word of thanks for allowing me early access to the project’s online database. Numerous librarians and archivists have assisted me over the course of my research, including Margo Gutiérrez of the University of Texas at Austin’s Mexican American Library Project; Lupita Fernández of the San Antonio Conservation Society; vii Chris Floerke, Dolores Olivarez, Tom Shelton, and Kendra Trachta of the University of Texas Institute of Texan Cultures at San Antonio; Bob O’Connor, Barbara Saletan and the staff of the Hertzberg Circus Museum, Carolina Villaroel of the Houston Public Library; and the staffs of the Benson Latin American Collection and the Center for American History, both at the University of Texas at Austin, and of the Texana/Genealogy collection at the San Antonio Public Library. I also thank Frances Terry, Pam Becker, Andi Shively, Susan Lane, Anne Merill, and M.A. Simms for helping guide me through the University’s adiministrative maze and for making the Department of Anthropology and the Américo Paredes Center for Cultural Studies such pleasant, friendly, and inviting places to be. Finally, to Laura Padilla, my partner and best friend, I offer loving thanks for emotional support, insightful comments, proofreading help, and for putting up with me during the difficult final stages of writing the dissertation. Her parents, Eligio and Kathleen Padilla, also deserve thanks for their support and understanding and for taking me to Costco. viii CARPA Y TEATRO, SOL Y SOMBRA Show Business and Public Culture in San Antonio’s Mexican Colony, 1900-1940 Publication No._____________ Peter Clair Haney, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2004 Supervisor: Richard Flores This project describes and analyzes the theatrical life of the ethnic Mexican colony in San Antonio, Texas, during the first half of the twentieth century, both as a historical phenomenon and as the object of public historical discourse. The study focuses the commercial musical comedy, vaudeville, and circus-like entertainments that are usually referred to as popular theater and the non-profit politically-oriented performance of Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s that claimed the earlier theater as a precursor. Key sources include fifty oral interviews with twenty former participants in that theatrical life, sound recordings of comic dialogues and sketches made by performers during the decades of the 1920s and 1930s, newspaper sources, the business records of a tent show called the Carpa Cubana, a set of manuscripts used by another tent show, the Carpa Monsiváis, and photographic records of several interviewees. The project argues that theatrical entertainment was a key part of a set of interlocking public discursive ix institutions through which ethnic Mexicans formed themselves into a community in San Antonio and southern Texas. In particular, the theater offered a space in which ethnic Mexicans symbolically reflected on the contradictions involved in their processes of community formation, resisted their socially subordinate position in a modernizing Texas, and created an image of themselves directed at the encompassing Anglo- dominated social order. This study surveys the typology of theatrical space in San Antonio’s Mexican colony, showing how the distinction between carpa (“tent show”) and teatro (“theater”) symbolized class divisions in the colony and led to status distinctions